^p 



THE- SIMPLE- LIFE 



BY 



Charles Wagner 



BJ 

AAfe 
^04 b< 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



DDDlbflflflb^E 




AUTHORIZED -EDITION 




Oass_.-. _: 

Book — 

4b 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 

By CHARLES WAGNER 

n 

Author of The Better Way 
By The Fireside 

Translated from the French by Mary Louise Hendee 




^ ( 



Popular Edition 



1 



McClure, Phillips & Co. 

New York 

1904 



\<\04 J8r 



COPTBIGHT, 1901, BY 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 



By exchange 
Army & 13avy Club 

JUN 2 2 1940 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. OUR COMPLEX LIFE ... 1 

II. THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY . 15 

III. SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT . 22 

IV. SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH . . 39 
V. SIMPLE DUTY .... 52 

VI. SIMPLE NEEDS . . . .68 

VII. SIMPLE PLEASURES ... 80 

VIII. THE MERCENARY SPIRIT AND 

SIMPLICITY .'•''. . .96 

IX. NOTORIETY AND THE INGLO- 
RIOUS GOOD . . . .111 
v 



vi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

X. THE WORLD AND THE LIFE 

OF THE HOME . . .128 

XL SIMPLE BEAUTY . . . .139 

XII. PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE 

INTERCOURSE OF MEN . .151 

XIII. THE EDUCATION FOR SIM- 

PLICITY 167 

XIV. CONCLUSION . . . , ,188 



THE SIMPLE LIFE 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 

AT the home of the Blanchards, every- 
thing is topsy-turvy, and with reason. 
Think of it ! Mile. Yvonne is to be 
married Tuesday, and to-day is Friday ! 
Callers loaded with gifts, and tradesmen bending 
under packages, come and go in endless procession. 
The servants are at the end of their endurance. As 
for the family and the betrothed, they no longer 
have a life or a fixed abode. Their mornings are 
spent with dressmakers, milliners, upholsterers, jewel- 
ers, decorators, and caterers. After that, comes a 
rush through offices, where one waits in line, gazing 
vaguely at busy clerks engulfed in papers. A fortu- 
nate thing, if there be time when this is over, to run 
home and dress for the series of ceremonial dinners 
— betrothal dinners, dinners of presentation, the set- 
tlement dinner, receptions, balls. About midnight, 
home again, harassed and weary, to find the latest 
accumulation of parcels, and a deluge of letters — 



2 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

congratulations, felicitations, acceptances and regrets 
from bridesmaids and ushers, excuses of tardy trades- 
men. And the contretemps of the last minute — 
a sudden death that disarranges the bridal party ; 
a wretched cold that prevents a favorite cantatrice 
from singing, and so forth, and so forth. Those 
poor Blanchards ! They will never be ready, and 
they thought they had foreseen everything ! 

Such has been their existence for a month. No 
longer possible to breathe, to rest a half-hour, to 
tranquillize one's thoughts. No, this is not living ! 

Mercifully, there is Grandmother's room. Grand- 
mother is verging on eighty. Through many toils 
and much suffering, she has come to meet things 
with the calm assurance which life brings to men 
and women of high thinking and large heart. She 
sits there in her arm-chair, enjoying the silence of 
long meditative hours. So the flood of affairs surg- 
ing through the house, ebbs at her door. At the 
threshold of this retreat, voices are hushed and 
footfalls softened ; and when the young Jances 
want to hide away for a moment, they flee to 
Grandmother. 

"Poor children!" is her greeting. "You are 
worn out ! Rest a little and belong to each other- 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 3 

All these things count for nothing. Don't let them 
absorb you, it isn't worth while." 

They know it well, these two young people. 
How many times in the last weeks has their love 
had to make way for all sorts of conventions and 
futilities !* Fate, at this decisive moment of their 
lives, seems bent upon drawing their minds away 
from the one thing essential, to harry them with a 
host of trivialities ; and heartily do they approve 
the opinion of Grandmamma when she says, between 
a smile and a caress : 

" Decidedly, my dears, the world is growing too 
complex ; and it does not make people happier — 
quite the contrary ! " 

1ALS O, am of Grandmamma's opinion. From the 
cradle to the grave, in his needs as in his pleas- 
ures, in his conception of the world and of him- 
self, the man of modern times struggles through a 
maze of endless complication. Nothing is simple any 
longer : neither thought nor action ; not pleasure, 
not even dying. With our own hands we have added 
to existence a train of hardships, and lopped off 
many a gratification. I believe that thousands of 
our fellow-men, suffering the consequences of a too 



4 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

artificial life, will be grateful if we try to give ex- 
pression to their discontent, and to justify the re- 
gret for naturalness which vaguely oppresses them. 

Let us first speak of a series of facts that put into 
relief the truth we wish to show 

The complexity of our life appears in the num- 
ber of our material needs. It is a fact universally 
conceded, that our needs have grown with our re- 
sources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth 
of certain needs is often a mark of progress. To 
feel the necessity of bathing, of wearing fresh linen, 
inhabiting wholesome houses, eating healthful food, 
and cultivating our minds, is a sign of superiority. 
But if certain needs exist by right, and are desir- 
able, there are others whose effects are fatal, which, 
like parasites, live at our expense : numerous and 
imperious, they engross us completely. 

Could our fathers have foreseen that we should 
some day have at our disposal the means and forces 
we now use in sustaining and defending our material 
life, they would have predicted for us an increase of 
independence, and therefore of happiness, and a de- 
crease in competition for worldly goods : they might 
even have thought that through the simplification of 
life thus made possible, a higher degree of morality 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 5 

would be attained. None of these things has come 
to pass. Neither happiness, nor brotherly love, nor 
power for good has been increased. In the first 
place, do you think your fellow-citizens, taken as a 
whole, are more contented than their forefathers, and 
less anxious about the future ? I do not ask if they 
should find reason to be so, but if they really are so. 
To see them live, it seems to me that a majority of 
them are discontented with their lot, and, above all. 
absorbed in material needs and beset with cares for 
the morrow. Never has the question of food and 
shelter been sharper or more absorbing than since 
we are better nourished, better clothed, and better 
housed than ever. He errs greatly who thinks that 
the query, " What shall we eat, and what shall we 
drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed ? " pres- 
ents itself to the poor alone, exposed as they are to 
the anguish of morrows without bread or a roof. 
With them the question is natural, and yet it is 
with them that it presents itself most simply. You 
must go among those who are beginning to enjoy a 
little ease, to learn how greatly satisfaction in what 
one has, may be disturbed by regret for what one 
lacks. And if you would see anxious care for future 
material good, material good in all its luxurious de- 



6 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

yelopment, observe people of small fortune, and, 
above all, the rich. It is not the woman with one 
dress who asks most insistently how she shall be 
clothed, nor is it those reduced to the strictly nec- 
essary who make most question of what they shall 
eat to-morrow. As an inevitable consequence of 
the law that needs are increased by their satisfac- 
tion, the more goods a man has 3 the more he wants. The 
more assured he is of the morrow, according to the 
common acceptation, the more exclusively does he 
concern himself with how he shall live, and pro- 
vide for his children and his children's children* 
Impossible to conceive of the fears of a man estab- 
lished in life — - their number, their reach, and their 
shades of refinement. 

From all this, there has arisen throughout the 
different social orders, modified by conditions and 
varying in intensity, a common agitation — a very 
complex mental state, best compared to the petu- 
lance of a spoiled child, at once satisfied and discon- 
tented. 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 7 

IF we have not become happier, neither have 
we grown more peaceful and fraternal. The 
more desires and needs a man has, the more 
occasion he finds for conflict with his fellow-men ; 
and these conflicts are more bitter in proportion as 
their causes are less just. It is the law of nature to 
fight for bread, for the necessities. This law may 
seem brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harsh- 
ness, and it is generally limited to elemental cruel- 
ties. Quite different is the battle for the superflu- 
ous — for ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. 
Never has hunger driven man to such baseness as 
have envy, avarice, and thirst for pleasure. Egotism 
grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined. 
We of these times have seen an increase of hostile 
feeling among brothers, and our hearts are less at 
peace than ever.* 

After this, is there any need to ask if we have 
Decome better ? Do not the very sinews of virtue 
lie in man's capacity to care for something outside 
himself? And what place remains for one's neigh- 
Dor in a life given over to material cares, to artificial 

* The author refers to the unparalleled bitterness of the 
conflict in France between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfus- 
ards. 



8 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

needs, to the satisfaction of ambitions, grudges, and 
whims ? The man who gives himself up entirely to 
the service of his appetites, makes them grow and 
multiply so well that they become stronger than he; 
and once their slave, he loses his moral sense, loses 
his energy, and becomes incapable of discerning and 
practicing the good. He has surrendered himself tc 
the inner anarchy of desire, which in the end gives 
birth to outer anarchy. In the moral life we goveru 
ourselves. In the immoral life we are governed by 
our needs and passions ; thus, little by little, the 
bases of the moral life shift, and the law of judg* 
ment deviates. 

For the man enslaved to numerous and exacting 
needs, possession is the supreme good and the source 
of all other good things. It is true that in the fierce 
struggle for possession, we come to hate those who 
possess, and to deny the right of property when this 
right is in the hands of others and not in our own. 
But the bitterness of attack against others' posses- 
sions is only a new proof of the extraordinary im- 
portance we attach to possession itself. In the end, 
people and things come to be estimated at their 
selling price, or according to the profit to be drawn 
from them. What brings nothing is worth nothing » c 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 9 

he who has nothing, is nothing. Honest poverty 
risks passing for shame, and lucre, however filthy, is 
not greatly put to it to be accounted for merit. 

Some one objects: "Then you make wholesale 
condemnation of progress, and would lead us back to 
the good old times — to asceticism perhaps." 

Not at all. The desire to resuscitate the past 
is the most unfruitful and dangerous of Utopian 
dreams, and the art of good living does not consist in 
retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light 
upon one of the errors that drag most heavily upon 
human progress, in order to find a remedy for it — 
namely, the belief that man becomes happier and 
better by the increase of outward well-being. 
Nothing is falser than this pretended social axiom : 
on the contrary, that material prosperity without an 
offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and 
debases character, is a fact which a thousand exam- 
ples are at hand to prove. The worth of a civiliza- 
tion is the worth of the man at its center. When 
this man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes 
bad worse, and further embroils social problems 



10 THE SIMPLE LIFE 



1 



"^HIS principle may be verified in other 
domains than that of material well-being. 
We shall speak only of education and lib- 
erty. We remember when prophets in good repute 
announced that to transform this wicked world into 
an abode fit for the gods, all that was needed was 
the overthrow of tyranny, ignorance, and want — 
those three dread powers so long in league. To- 
day, other preachers proclaim the same gospel. We 
have seen that the unquestionable diminution of 
want has made man neither better nor happier. 
Has this desirable result been more nearly attained 
through the great care bestowed upon instruction ? 
It does not yet appear so, and this failure is the de- 
spair of our national educators. 

Then shall we stop the people's ears, suppress 
public instruction, close the schools ? By no means. 
But education, like the mass of our age's inventions, 
is after all only a tool ; everything depends upon 
the workman who uses it. • • • So it is with 
liberty. It is fatal or lifegiving according to 
the use made of it. Is it liberty still, when it 
Is the prerogative of criminals or heedless blun- 
derers ? Liberty is an atmosphere of the higher 
life* and it is only by a slow and patient inward 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 11 

transformation that one becomes capable of breath- 
ing it. 

All life must have its law, the life of man so 
much the more than that of inferior beings, in that 
it is more precious and of nicer adjustment. This 
law for man is in the first place an external law, but 
it may become an internal law. When man has 
once recognized the inner law, and bowed before it, 
through this reverence and voluntary submission he 
is ripe for liberty : so long as there is no vigorous 
and sovereign inner law, he is incapable of breath- 
ing its air ; for he will be drunken with it, mad- 
dened, morally slain. The man who guides his life 
by inner law, can no more live servile to outward 
authority than can the full-grown bird live impris- 
oned in the eggshell. But the man who has not 
yet attained to governing himself can no more live 
under the law of liberty than can the unfledged 
bird live without its protective covering. These 
things are terribly simple, and the series of demon- 
strations old and new that proves them, increases 
daily under our eyes. And yet we are as far as 
ever from understanding even the elements of this 
most important law. In our democracy, how many 
are there, great and small, who know, from having 



12 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

personally verified it, lived it and obeyed it, this 
truth without which a people is incapable of govern- 
ing itself ? Liberty? — it is respect; liberty? — it is 
obedience to the inner law ; and this law is neither 
the good pleasure of the mighty, nor the caprice of 
the crowd, but the high and impersonal rule before 
which those who govern are the first to bow the head 
Shall liberty, then, be proscribed ? No ; but men 
must be made capable and worthy of it, otherwise 
public life becomes impossible, and the nation, undis- 
ciplined and unrestrained, goes on through license 
into the inextricable tangles of demagoguery. 

WHEN one passes in review the individual 
causes that disturb and complicate our 
social life, by whatever names they are 
designated, and their list would be long, they all 
lead back to one general cause, which is this : the 
confusion of the secondary with the essential. Material 
comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilization 
— these things constitute the frame of the picture ; 
but the frame no more makes the picture than the 
frock the monk or the uniform the soldier. Here 
the picture is man, and man with his most intimate 
possessions — namely, his conscience, his character 



OUR COMPLEX LIFE 13 

and his will. And while we have been elaborating 
and garnishing the frame, we have forgotten, neg- 
lected, disfigured the picture. Thus are we load- 
ed with external good, and miserable in spiritual 
life ; we have in abundance that which, if must be, 
we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the 
one thing needful. And when the depth of out 
being is stirred, with its need of loving, aspiring, 
fulfilling its destiny, it feels the anguish of one 
buried alive — is smothered under the mass of sec- 
ondary things that weigh it down and deprive it 
of light and air. 

We must search out, set free, restore to honor the 
true life, assign things to their proper places, and 
remember that the center of human progress is 
moral growth. What is a good lamp ? It is not 
the most elaborate, the finest wrought, that of the 
most precious metal. A good lamp is a lamp that 
gives good light. And so also we are men and citi- 
zens, not by reason of the number of our goods and 
the pleasures we procure for ourselves, not through 
our intellectual and artistic culture, nor because of 
the honors and independence we enjoy; but by 
virtue of the strength of our moral fibre. And this 
is not a truth of to-day but a truth of all times 



14 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

At no epoch have the exterior conditions which 
man has made for himself by his industry or his 
knowledge, been able to exempt him from care for 
the state of his inner life. The face of the world 
alters around us, its intellectual and material factors 
vary; and no one can arrest these changes, whose 
suddenness is sometimes not short of perilous. But 
the important thing is that at the center of shift- 
ing circumstance man should remain man, live his 
life, make toward his goal. And whatever be his 
road, to make toward his goal, the traveler must 
not lose himself in crossways, nor hamper his move- 
ments with useless burdens. Let him heed well 
his direction and forces, and keep good faith ; and 
that he may the better devote himself to the es^ 
sential — which is to progress — at whatever sacri- 
fice, let him simplify his baggage. 



II 

THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY 

BEFORE considering the question of a 
practical return to the simplicity of which 
we dream, it will be necessary to define 
simplicity in its very essence. For in 
regard to it people commit the same error that 
we have just denounced, confounding the sec- 
ondary with the essential, substance with form. 
They are tempted to believe that simplicity presents 
certain external characteristics by which it may be 
recognized, and in which it really consists. Sim- 
plicity and lowly station, plain dress, a modest 
dwelling, slender means, poverty — these things 
seem to go together. Nevertheless, this is not the 
case. Just now I passed three men on the street : 
the first in his carriage ; the others on foot, and 
one of them shoeless. The shoeless man does not 
necessarily lead the least complex life of the 
three. It may be, indeed, that he who rides in 

his carriage is sincere and unaffected, in spite of 

15 



16 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

his position, and is not at all the slave of his wealth ; 
it may be also that the pedestrian in shoes neither 
envies him who rides nor despises him who goes 
unshod ; and lastly, it is possible that under his 
rags, his feet in the dust, the third man lias a hatred 
of simplicity, of labor, of sobriety, and dreams only of 
idleness and pleasure. For among the least simple 
and straightforward of men must be reckoned pro- 
fessional beggars, knights of the road, parasites, and 
the whole tribe of the obsequious and envious, 
whose aspirations are summed up in this : to arrive 
at seizing a morsel — the biggest possible — of that 
prey which the fortunate of earth consume. And to 
this same category, little matter what their station 
in life, belong the profligate, the arrogant, the 
miserly, the weak, the crafty. Livery counts for 
nothing : we must see the heart. No class has the 
prerogative of simplicity ; no dress, however humble 
in appearance, is its unfailing badge. Its dwelling 
need not be a garret, a hut, the cell of the ascetic 
nor the lowliest fisherman's bark. Under all the 
forms in which life vests itself, in all social posi- 
tions, at the top as at the bottom of the ladder, there 
are people who live simply, and others who do 
not. We do not mean by this that simplicity betrays 



THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY 17 

itself in no visible signs, has not its own habits, its 
distinguishing tastes and ways ; but this outward 
show, which may now and then be counterfeited, 
must not be confounded with its essence and its deep 
and wholly inward source. Simplicity is a state of 
mind. It dwells in the main intention of our lives. 
A man is simple when his chief care is the wish to be 
what he ought to be, that is, honestly and naturally 
human. And this is neither so easy nor so impossi- 
ble as one might think. At bottom, it consists in 
putting our acts and aspirations in accordance with 
the law of our being, and consequently with the 
Eternal Intention which willed that we should be at 
all. Let a flower be a flower, a swallow a swallow, a 
rock a rock, and let a man be a man, and not a fox, 
a hare, a hog, or a bird of prey : this is the sum of 
the whole matter. 

Here we are led to formulate the practical ideal of 
man. Every wh ere in life we see certain quantities 
of matter and energy associated for certain ends. 
Substances more or less crude are thus transformed 
and carried to a higher degree of organization. It 
is not otherwise with the life of man.. The human 
ideal is to transform life into something more excel- 
lent than itself. We may compare existence to raw 



18 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

materiaL What it is, matters less than what is made 
of it, as the value of a work of art lies in the flower- 
ing of the workman's skill. We bring into the 
world with us different gifts : one has received gold, 
another granite, a third marble, most of us wood or 
clay. Our task is to fashion these substances. 
Everyone knows that the most precious material 
may be spoiled, and he knows, too, that out of the 
least costly an immortal work may be shaped. Art 
is the realization of a permanent idea in an ephemeral 
form. True life is the realization of the higher vir- 
tues, — justice, love, truth, liberty, moral power,—— 
in our daily activities, whatever they may be. And 
this life is possible in social conditions the most 
diverse, and with natural gifts the most unequal. 
It is not fortune or personal advantage, but our 
turning them to account, that constitutes the value 
of life. Fame adds no more than does length of 
days : quality is the thing. 

Need we say that one does not rise to this point 
of view without a struggle ? The spirit of simplic- 
ity is not an inherited gift, but the result of a labo- 
rious conquest. Plain living, like high thinking, is 
simplification. We know that science is the hand- 
ful of ultimate principles gathered out of the tufted 



THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY 19 

mass of facts ; but what gropings to discover them ! 
Centuries of research are often condensed into a 
principle that a line may state. Here the moral life 
presents strong analogy with the scientific. It, too, 
begins in a certain confusion, makes trial of itself, 
seeks to understand itself, and often mistakes. But 
by dint of action, and exacting from himself strict 
account of his deeds, man arrives at a better knowl- 
edge of life. Its law appears to him, and the law is 
this : Work out your mission. He w T ho applies him- 
self to aught else than the realization of this end, 
loses in living the raison d'etre of life. The egoist 
does so, the pleasure-seeker, the ambitious : he 
consumes existence as one eating the full corn in 
the blade, — he prevents it from bearing its fruit ; 
his life is lost. Whoever, on the contrary, makes 
his life serve a good higher than itself, saves it in 
giving it. Moral precepts, which to a superficial 
view appear arbitrary, and seem made to spoil our 
zest for life, have really but one object — to pre- 
serve us from the evil of having lived in vain. That 
is why they are constantly leading us back into the 
same paths ; that is why they all have the same 
meaning : Do not waste your life, make it bear fruit ; 
learn how to give it, in order that it may not con* 



SO THE SIMPLE LIFE 

sume itself! Herein is summed up the experience 
of humanUy, and this experience, which each man 
must remake for himself, is more precious in pro- 
portion as it costs more dear. Illumined by its 
light, he makes a moral advance more and more 
sure. Now he has his means of orientation, his in- 
ternal norm to which he may lead everything back : 
and from the vacillating, confused, and complex be- 
ing that he was, he becomes simple. By the cease- 
less influence of this same law, which expands 
within him, and is day by day verified in fact, his 
opinions and habits become transformed. 

Once captivated by the beauty and sublimity of 
the true life, by what is sacred and pathetic in this 
strife of humanity for truth, justice, and brotherly 
love, his heart holds the fascination of it. Gradu- 
ally everything subordinates itself to this power- 
ful and persistent charm. The necessary hierarchy 
of powers is organized within him : the essential 
commands, the secondary obeys, and order is born 
of simplicity. We may compare this organization of 
the interior life to that of an army. An army is 
strong by its discipline, and its discipline consists in 
respect of the inferior for the superior, and the con- 
centration of all its energies toward a single end : 



THE ESSENCE OF SIMPLICITY 21 

discipline once relaxed, the army suffers. It will 
not do to let the corporal command the general. 
Examine carefully your life and the lives of others. 
Whenever something halts or jars, and complica- 
tions and disorder follow, it is because the corporal 
has issued orders to the general. Where the nat- 
ural law rules in the heart, disorder vanishes. 

I despair of ever describing simplicity in any 
worthy fashion. All the strength of the world and 
all its beauty, all true joy, everything that consoles, 
that feeds hope, or throws a ray of light along our 
dark paths, everything that makes us see across our 
poor lives a splendid goal and a boundless future, 
comes to us from people of simplicity, those who 
have made another object of their desires than the 
passing satisfaction of selfishness and vanity, and 
have understood that the art of living is to know 
how to give one's life. 



Ill 

SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 

IT is not alone among the practical manifes- 
tations of our life that there is need of mak- 
ing a clearing : the domain of our ideas is in 
the same case. Anarchy reigns in human 
thought : we walk in the woods, without compass or 
sun, lost among the brambles and briars of infinite 
detail. 

When once man has recognized the fact that he 
has an aim, and that this aim is to be a man, he or- 
ganizes his thought accordingly. Every mode of 
thinking or judging which does not make him bet- 
ter and stronger, he rejects as dangerous. 

And first of all he flees the too common contrari- 
ety of amusing himself with his thought. Thought 
is a tool, with its own proper function : it isn't a 
toy. Let us take an example. Here is the studio 
of a painter. The implements are all in place i 
everything indicates that this assemblage of means 
is arranged with view to an end. Throw the room 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 23 

open to apes. They will climb on the benches, 
swing from the cords, rig themselves in draperies, 
coif themselves with slippers, juggle with brushes, 
nibble the colors, and pierce the canvases to see 
what is behind the paint. I don't question their 
enjoyment ; certainly they must find this kind of 
exercise extremely interesting. But an atelier is 
not made to let monkeys loose in. No more is 
thought a ground for acrobatic evolutions. A man 
worthy of the name, thinks as he is, as his tastes 
are : he goes about it with his whole heart, and not 
with that fitful and sterile curiosity which, under 
pretext of observing and noting everything, runs the 
risk of never experiencing a deep and true emotion 
or accomplishing a right deed. 

Another habit in urgent need of correction, or- 
dinary attendant on conventional life, is the mania 
for examining and analyzing one's self at every turn. 
I do not invite men to neglect introspection and the 
examination of conscience. The endeavor to un- 
derstand one's own mental attitudes and motives of 
conduct is an essential element of good living. 
But quite other is this extreme vigilance, this in- 
cessant observation of one's life and thoughts, this 
dissecting of one's self, like a piece of mechanism. 



24 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

It is a waste of time, and goes wide of the mark. 
The man who, to prepare himself the better for walk- 
ing, should begin by making a rigid anatomical ex- 
amination of his means of locomotion, would risk 
dislocating something before he had taken a step. 
You have what you need to walk with, then for- 
ward ! Take care not to fall, and use your forces 
with discretion. Potterers and scruple-mongers are 
soon reduced to inaction. It needs but a glimmer 
of common sense to perceive that man is not made 
to pass his life in a self-centered trance. 

And common sense — do you not find what is 
designated by this name becoming as rare as the 
common-sense customs of other days ? Common 
sense has become an old story. We must have 
something new — and we create a factitious exist- 
ence, a refinement of living, that the vulgar crowd 
has not the wherewithal to procure. It is so agree- 
able to be distinguished ! Instead of conducting 
ourselves like rational beings, and using the means 
most obviously at our command, we arrive, by dint 
of absolute genius, at the most astonishing singu- 
larities. Better off the track than on the main 
line I All the bodily defects and deformities that 
orthopedy treats, give but a feeble idea of the 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 25 

humps, the tortuosities, the dislocations we have 
inflicted upon ourselves in order to depart from 
simple common sense; and at our own expense we 
learn that one does not deform himself with im- 
punity. Novelty, after all, is ephemeral. Nothing 
endures but the eternal commonplace ; and if one 
departs from that, it is to run the most perilous 
risks. Happy he who is able to reclaim himself, 
who finds the way back to simplicity. 

Good plain sense is not, as is often imagined, the 
innate possession of the first chance-comer, a mean 
and paltry equipment that has cost nothing to any- 
one. I would compare it to those old folk-songs, 
unfathered but deathless, which seem to have risen 
out of the very heart of the people. Good sense is 
a fund slowly and painfully accumulated by the 
labor of centuries. It is a jewel of the first water, 
whose value he alone understands who has lost it, 
or who observes the lives of others who have lost 
it. For my part, I think no price too great to pay 
fo v gaining it and keeping it, for the possession of 
eyes that see and a judgment that discerns. One 
takes good care of his sword, that it be not bent or 
rusted : with greater reason should he give heed tc 
his thought. 



20 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

But let this be well understood : an appeal to 
common sense is not an appeal to thought that 
grovels, to narrow positivism which denies every- 
thing it cannot see or touch. For to wish that man 
should be absorbed in material sensations, to the ex- 
clusion of the high realities of the inner life, is also 
a want of good sense. Here we touch upon a ten- 
der point, round which the greatest battles of hu- 
manity are waging. In truth we are striving to 
attain a conception of life, searching it out amid 
countless obscurities and griefs : and everything 
that touches upon spiritual realities becomes day by 
day more painful. In the midst of the grave per- 
plexities and transient disorders that accompany 
great crises of thought, it seems more difficult than 
ever to escape with any simple principles. Yet 
necessity itself comes to our aid, as it has done for 
the men of all times. The program of life is ter- 
ribly simple, after all, and in the fact that existence 
so imperiously forces herself upon us, she gives us 
notice that she precedes any idea of her which we 
may make for ourselves, and that no one can put off 
living pending an attempt to understand life. Our 
philosophies, our explanations, our beliefs are every- 
where confronted by facts, and these facts, prodi* 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 27 

gious, irrefutable, call us to order when we would 
deduce life from our reasonings, and would wait 
to act until we have ended philosophizing. It is 
this happy necessity that prevents the world from 
stopping while man questions his route. Travelers 
of a day, we are carried along in a vast movement to 
which we are called upon to contribute, but which 
we have not foreseen, nor embraced in its entirety, 
nor penetrated as to its ultimate aims. Our part is 
to fill faithfully the role of private, which has de- 
volved upon us, and our thought should adapt itself 
to the situation. Do not say that we live in more 
trying times than our ancestors, for things seen from 
afar are often seen imperfectly : it is moreover 
scarcely gracious to complain of not having been born 
in the days of one's grandfather. What we may be- 
lieve least contestable on the subject is this : from 
the beginning of the world it has been hard to see 
clearly; right thinking has been difficult every- 
where and always. In the matter the ancients 
were in no wise privileged above the moderns, and it 
might be added that there is no difference between 
men when they are considered from this point of 
view. Master and servant, teacher and learner, 
writer and artisan discern truth at the same cost. 



28 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

The light that humanity acquires in advancing is no 
doubt of the greatest use ; but it also multiplies the 
number and extent of human problems. The diffi- 
culty is never removed, the mind always encounters 
its obstacle. The unknown controls us and hems us 
in on all sides. But just as one need not exhaust a 
spring to quench his thirst, so we need not knoAv 
everything to live. Humanity lives and always ha> 
lived on certain elemental provisions. 

We will try to point them out. First of all, hu 
manity lives by confidence. In so doing it but 
reflects, commensurate with its conscious thought, 
that which is the hidden source of all beings. An 
imperturbable faith in the stability of the universe 
and its intelligent ordering, sleeps in everything that 
exists. The flowers, the trees, the beasts of the 
field, live in calm strength, in entire security. 
There is confidence in the falling rain, in dawn- 
ing day, in the brook running to the sea. Every- 
thing that is seems to say : ee I am, therefore I 
should be ; there are good reasons for this, rest 
assured." 

So, too, mankind lives by confidence. From the 
simple fact that he is, man has within him the suffi- 
cient reason for his being — a pledge of assurance. 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 29 

He reposes in the power which has willed that he 
should be. To safeguard this confidence, to see that 
nothing disconcerts it, to cultivate it, render it more 
personal, more evident — toward this should tend 
the first effort of our thought. All that augments 
confidence within us is good, for from confidence is 
born the life without haste, tranquil energy, calm 
action, the love of life and its fruitful labor. Deep- 
seated confidence is the mysterious spring that sets 
in motion the energy within us. It is our nutri- 
ment. By it man lives, much more than by the 
bread he eats. And so everything that shakes this 
confidence is evil — poison, not food. 

Dangerous is every system of thought that at- 
tacks the very fact of life, declaring it to be an evil. 
Life has been too often wrongly estimated in this 
century. What wonder that the tree withers when 
its roots are watered with corrosives. And there is 
an extremely simple reflection that might be made 
in the face of all this negation. You say life is an 
evil. Well ; what remedy for it do you offer ? Can 
you combat it, suppress it ? I do not ask you to 
suppress your own life, to commit suicide ; — of what 
advantage would that be to us ? — but to suppress life, 
not merely human life, but life at its deep and hid- 



30 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

den origin, all this upspringing of existence that 
pushes toward the light and, to your mind, is rush- 
ing to misfortune ; I ask you to suppress the will to 
live that trembles through the immensities of space, 
to suppress in short the source of life. Can you do 
it ? No. Then leave us in peace. Since no one 
can hold life in check, is it not better to respect it 
and use it than to go about making other people 
disgusted with it ? When one knows that certain 
food is dangerous to health, he does not eat it, and 
when a certain fashion of thinking robs us of con- 
fidence, cheerfulness and strength, we should reject 
that, certain not only that it is a nutriment noxious 
to the mind, but also that it is false. There is no 
truth for man but in thoughts that are human, and 
pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it wants as much in 
modesty as in logic. To permit one's self to count 
as evil this prodigious thing that we call life, one 
needs have seen its very foundation, almost to have 
made it. What a strange attitude is that of certain 
great thinkers of our times ! They act as if they 
had created the world, very long ago, in their youth, 
but decidedly it was a mistake, and they had well 
repented it. s 

Let us nourish ourselves from other meat ; 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 31 

strengthen our souls with cheering thoughts. What 
is truest for man is what best fortifies him. 



IF mankind lives by confidence, it lives also by- 
hope — that form of confidence which turns 
toward the future. All life is a result and an 
aspiration, all that exists supposes an origin and tends 
toward an end. Life is progression : progression is 
aspiration. The progress of the future is an infini- 
tude of hope. Hope is at the root of things, and 
must be reflected in the heart of man. No hope, no 
life. The same power which brought us into being, 
urges us to go up higher. What is the meaning of 
this persistent instinct which pushes us on ? The 
true meaning is that something is to result from life, 
that out of it is being wrought a good greater than 
itself, toward which it slowly moves, and that this 
painful sower called man, needs, like every sower, to 
count on the morrow. The history of humanity is 
the history of indomitable hope ; otherwise every- 
thing would have been over long ago. To press 
forward under his burdens, to guide himself in the 
night, to retrieve his falls and his failures, to escape 
despair even in death, man has need of hoping al- 
ways, and sometimes against all hope. Here is the 



82 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

cordial that sustains him. Had we only logic, we 
should have long ago drawn the conclusion : Death 
has everywhere the last word ! — and we should be 
dead of the idea. But we have hope, and that is 
why we live and believe in life. 

Suso, the great monk and mystic, one of the sim- 
plest and best men that ever lived, had a touching 
custom : whenever he encountered a woman, were 
she the poorest and oldest, he stepped respectfullv 
aside, though his bare feet must tread among thorns 
or in the gutter. " I do that," he said, " to render 
homage to our Holy Lady, the Virgin Mary." Let 
us offer to hope a like reverence. If we meet it in 
the shape of a blade of wheat piercing the furrow ; 
a bird brooding on its nest ; a poor wounded beast, 
recovering itself, rising and continuing its way; a 
peasant ploughing and sowing a field that has been 
ravaged by flood or hail ; a nation slowly repairing 
its losses and healing its wounds - — under whatever 
guise of humanity or suffering it appears to us, let us 
salute it ! When we encounter it in legends, in un- 
tutored songs, in simple creeds, let us still salute it .' 
for it is always the same, indestructible, the immor- 
tal daughter of God. 

We do not dare hope enough. The men of our 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 35 

day have developed strange timidities. The appre- 
hension that the sky will fall — that acme of absurd- 
ity among the fears of our Gallic forefathers — has en- 
tered our own hearts. Does the rain-drop doubt the 
ocean ? the ray mistrust the sun ? Our senile wisdom 
has arrived at this prodigy. It resembles those testy 
old pedagogues whose chief office is to rail at the 
merry pranks or the youthful enthusiasms of their 
pupils. It is time to become little children once 
more, to learn again to stand with clasped hands and 
wide eyes before the mystery around us ; to remem- 
ber that, in spite of our knowledge, what we know 
is but a trifle, and that the world is greater than our 
mind, which is well ; for being so prodigious, it must 
hold in reserve untold resources, and we may allow it 
some credit without accusing ourselves of improvi-* 
dence. Let us not treat it as creditors do an insolv- 
ent debtor : we should fire its courage, relight the 
sacred flame of hope. Since the sun still rises, since 
. earth puts forth her blossoms anew, since the bird 
builds its nest, and the mother smiles at her child, 
let us have the courage to be men, and commit the 
rest to Him who has numbered the stars. For my 
part, I would I might find glowing words to say to 
whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillu- 



34 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

sion : Rouse your courage, hope on ; he is sure of 
being least deluded who has the daring to do that ; 
the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth than the 
most rational despair. 

ANOTHER source of light on the path of 
human life is goodness. I am not of those 
who believe in the natural perfection of 
man, and teach that society corrupts him. On the 
contrary, of all forms of evil, the one which most 
dismays me is heredity. But I sometimes ask my- 
self how it is that this effete and deadly virus of low 
instincts, of vices inoculated in the blood, the 
whole assemblage of disabilities imposed upon us by 
the past — how all this has not got the better of us. 
Jt must be because of something else. This other 
thing is love. 

Given the unknown brooding above our heads, our 
limited intelligence, the grievous and contradictory 
enigma of human destiny, falsehood, hatred, corrup- 
tion, suffering, death — what can we think, what do ? 
To all these questions a sublime and mysterious voice 
has answered : Love your fellow-men. Love must in- 
deed be divine, like faith and hope, since she cannot 
die when so many powers are arrayed against her. 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 85 

She has to combat the natural ferocity of what may 
be called the beast in man ; she has to meet ruse, 
force, self-interest, above all, ingratitude. How is it 
that she passes pure and scathless in the midst of 
these dark enemies, like the prophet of the sacred 
legend among the roaring beasts ? It is because her 
enemies are of the earth, and love is from above. 
Horns, teeth, claws, eyes full of murderous fire, are 
powerless against the swift wing that soars toward 
the heights and eludes them. Thus love escapes 
the undertakings of her foes. She does even bet- 
ter : she has sometimes known the fine triumph of 
winning over her persecutors: she has seen the wild 
beasts grow calm, lie down at her feet, obey her 
law. 

At the very heart of the Christian faith, the most 
sublime of its teachings, and to him who penetrates 
its deepest sense, the most human, is this : To save 
lost humanity, the invisible God came to dwell 
among us, in the form of a man, and willed to make 
Himself known by this single sign : Lore. 

Healing, consoling, tender to the unfortunate, 
even to the evil, love engenders light beneath her 
feet. She clarifies, she simplifies. She has chosen 
the humblest part — to bind up wounds, wipe away 



S6 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

tears, relieve distress, soothe aching hearts, pardon 
make peace ; yet it is of love that we have the great- 
est need. And as we meditate on the best way to 
render thought fruitful, simple, really conformable 
to our destiny, the method sums itself up in these 
words : Have confidence and hope; be kind, 

I would not discourage lofty speculation, dissuade 
any one whomsoever from brooding over the prob- 
lems of the unknown, over the vast abysses of sci- 
ence or philosophy. But we have always to come 
back from these far journeys to the point where we 
are, often to a place where we seem to stand mark- 
ing time with no result. There are conditions of 
life and social complications in which the sage, the 
thinker, and the ignorant are alike unable to see 
clearly. The present age has often brought us face 
to face with such situations ; I am sure that he who 
meets them with our method will soon recognize its 
worth. 

SINCE I have touched here upon religious 
ground, at least in a general way, someone 
may ask me to say in a few simple words, 
what religion is the best ; and I gladly express my- 
self on this subject. But it might be better not to 



SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT 87 

put the question in this form. All religions have, 
of necessity, certain fixed characteristics, and each 
has its inherent qualities or defects. Strictly speak- 
ing, then, they may be compared among themselves : 
but there are always involuntary partialities or fore- 
gone conclusions. It is better to put the question 
otherwise, and ask: Is my own religion good, and 
how may I know it ? To this question, this answer : 
Your religion is good if it is vital and active, if it 
nourishes in you confidence, hope, love, and a senti- 
ment of the infinite value of existence ; if it is allied 
with what is best in you against what is worst, and 
holds forever before you the necessity of becoming a 
new man ; if it makes you understand that pain is a 
deliverer ; if it increases your respect for the con- 
science of others ; if it renders forgiveness more 
easy, fortune less arrogant, duty more dear, the be- 
yond less visionary. If it does these things it is 
good, little matter its name : however rudimentary 
it may be, when it fills this office it comes from the 
true source, it binds you to man and to God. 

But does it perchance serve to make you think 
yourself better than others, quibble over texts, wear 
sour looks, domineer over other's consciences or give 
your own over to bondage; stifle your scruples, fol- 



38 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

low religious forms for fashion or gain, do good in 
the hope of escaping future punishment ? — oh, then, 
if you proclaim yourself the follower of Buddha, 
Moses, Mahomet, or even Christ, your religion is 
worthless — it separates you from God and man. 

I have not perhaps the right to speak thus in my 
own name; but others have so spoken before me 
who are greater than I, and notably He who re- 
counted to the questioning scribe the parable of the 
Good Samaritan. I intrench myself behind His au- 
thority. 



IV 

SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 

SPEECH is the chief revelation of the mind, 
the first visible form that it takes. As the 
thought^ so the speech. To better one's life 
in the way of simplicity, one must set a 
watch on his lips and his pen. Let the word be as 
genuine as the though t, as artless, as valid: think 
justly, speak frankly. 

All social relations have their roots in mutual 
trust, and this trust is maintained by each man's 
sincerity. Once sincerity diminishes, confidence is 
weakened, society suffers, apprehension is born. 
This is true in the province of both natural and 
spiritual interests. With people whom we distrust, 
it is as difficult to do business as to search for 
scientific truth, arrive at religious harmony, or attain 
to justice. When one must first question words 
and intentions, and start from the premise that 
everything said and written is meant to offer us 

illusion in place of truth, life becomes strangely 

39 



40 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

complicated. This is the case to-day. There is so 
much crafty so much diplomacy, so much subtle 
legerdemain, that we all have no end of trouble to 
inform ourselves on the simplest subject and the 
one that most concerns us. Probably what I have 
just said would suffice to show my thought, and each 
one's experience might bring to its support an ample 
commentary with illustrations. But I am none the 
less moved to insist on this point, and to strengthen 
my position with examples. 

Formerly the means of communication between 
men were considerably restricted. It was natural 
to suppose that in perfecting and multiplying ave- 
nues of information, a better understanding would 
be brought about. Nations would learn to love 
each other as they became acquainted ; citizens of 
one country would feel themselves bound in closer 
brotherhood as more light was thrown on what con- 
cerned their common life. When printing was in- 
vented, the cry arose : Jiat lux ! and with better 
cause when the habit of reading and the taste for 
newspapers increased. Why should not men have 
reasoned thus : — " Two lights illumine better than 
one, and many better than two : the more period- 
icals and books there are, the better we shall know 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 41 

what happens, and those who wish to write history 
after us will be right fortunate ; their hands will be 
full of documents " ? Nothing could have seemed 
more evident. Alas ! this reasoning was based upon 
the nature and capacity of the instruments, without 
taking into account the human element, always the 
most important factor. And what has really come 
about is this : that cavilers, calumniators, and crooks 
— all gentlemen glib of tongue, who know better 
than any one else how to turn voice and pen to ac- 
count — have taken the utmost advantage of these 
extended means for circulating thought, with the 
result that the men of our times have the greatest 
difficulty in the world to know the truth about their 
own age and their own affairs. For every newspaper 
that fosters good feeling and good understanding 
between nations, by trying to rightly inform its 
neighbors and to study them without reservations, 
how many spread defamation and distrust J What un- 
natural and dangerous currents of opinion set in mo- 
tion ! what false alarms and malicious interpretations 
of words and facts ! And in domestic affairs we are not 
much better informed than in foreign. As to com- 
mercial, industrial, and agricultural interests, political 
parties and social tendencies, or the personality of 



4& THE SIMPLE LIFE 

public men, it is alike difficult to obtain a disinter- 
ested opinion. The more newspapers one reads, the 
less clearly he sees in these matters. There are 
days when after having read them all, and admitting 
that he takes them at their word, the reader finds 
himself obliged to draw this conclusion : — Unques- 
tionably nothing but corruption can be found any 
longer — no men of integrity except a few journalists. 
But the last part of the conclusion falls in its turn, 
It appears that the chroniclers devour each other. 
The reader has under his eyes a spectacle somewhat 
like the cartoon entitled, "The Combat of the Ser« 
pents." After having gorged themselves with every* 
thing around them, the reptiles fall upon each other, 
and there remain upon the field of battle two tails 
And not the common people alone feel this em* 
barrassment, but the cultivated also — almost every, 
body shares it. In politics, finance, business — even 
in science, art, literature and religion, there is every- 
where disguise, trickery, wire-pulling; one truth for 
the public, another for the initiated. The result is 
that everybody is deceived. It is vain to be behind 
the scenes on one stage ; a man cannot be there on 
them all, and the very people who deceive others 
with the most abilitv, are in turn deceived when 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 43 

they need to count upon the sincerity of their neigh- 
bors. 

The result of such practices is the degradation 
of human speech. It is degraded first in the eyes 
of those who manipulate it as a base instrument. 
No word is respected by sophists, casuists, and quib- 
blers, men who are moved only by a rage for gain- 
ing their point, or who assume that their interests 
are alone worth considering. Their penalty is to 
be forced to judge others by the rule they follow 
themselves : Say what profits and not what is trite. 
They can no longer take any one seriously — a sad 
state of mind for those who write or teach ' How 
lightly must one hold his readers and hearers to ap- 
proach them in such an attitude ! To him who has 
preserved enough honesty, nothing is more repug- 
nant than the careless irony of an acrobat of the 
tongue or pen, who tries to dupe honest and ingen- 
uous men. On one side openness, sincerity, the de- 
sire to be enlightened ; on the other, chicanery 
making game of the public ! But he knows not, the 
liar, how far he is misleading himself. The capi- 
tal on which he lives is confidence, and nothing 
equals the confidence of the people, unless it be 
their distrust when once they find themselves be- 



44 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

trayed. They may follow for a time the exploiters 
of their artlessness, but then their friendly humor 
turns to hate. Doors which stood wide open offer 
an impassable front of wood, and ears once attentive 
are deaf. And the pity is that they have closed not 
to the evil alone, but to the good. This is the 
crime of those who distort and degrade speech : 
they shake confidence generally. We consider as 
a calamity the debasement of the currency, the low- 
ering of interest, the abolition of credit : — there is a 
misfortune greater than these : the loss of confi- 
dence, of that moral credit which honest people 
give one another, and which makes speech circulate 
like an authentic currency. Away with counter- 
feiters, speculators, rotten financiers, for they bring 
under suspicion even the coin of the realm. Away 
with the makers of counterfeit speech, for because 
d( them there is no longer confidence in anyone or 
anything, and what they say and write is not worth 
a continental. 

You see how urgent it is that each should guard 
his lips, chasten his pen, and aspire to simplicity of 
speech. No more perversion of sense, circumlocution, 
reticence, tergiversation ! these things serve only to 
complicate and bewilder. Be men ; speak the speech 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 46 

of honor. An hour of plain-dealing does more for 
the salvation of the world than years of duplicity. 

A WORD now about a national bias, to those 
who have a veneration for diction and style. 
Assuredly there can be no quarrel with the 
taste for grace and elegance of speech. I am of 
opinion that one cannot say too well what he has 
to say. But it does not follow that the things best 
said and best written are most studied. Words 
should serve the fact, and not substitute themselves 
for it and make it forgotten in its embellishment. 
The greatest things are those which gain the most by 
being said most simply, since thus they show them- 
selves for what they are : you do not throw over them 
the veil, however transparent, of beautiful discourse, 
nor that shadow so fatal to truth, called the writer's 
vanity. Nothing so strong, nothing so persuasive, as 
simplicity ! There are sacred emotions, cruel griefs, 
splendid heroisms, passionate enthusiasms that a 
look, a movement, a cry interprets better than beau- 
tifully rounded periods. The most precious posses- 
sions of the heart of humanity manifest themselves 
most simply. To be convincing, a thing must be 
true, and certain truths are more evident when they 



46 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

come in the speech of ingenuousness, even weak- 
ness, than when they fall from lips too well trained, 
or are proclaimed with trumpets. And these rules 
are good for each of us in his e very-day life. No 
one can imagine what profit would accrue to his 
moral life from the constant observation of this prin- 
ciple : Be sincere, moderate, simple in the expres- 
sion of your feelings and opinions, in private and 
public alike ; never pass beyond bounds, give out 
faithfully what is within you, and above all, watch. 
— that is the main thing. 

For the danger in fine words is that they live 
from a life of their own. They are servants of dis- 
tinction, that have kept their titles but no longei 
perform their functions — of which royal courts offer 
us example. You speak well, write well, and all is 
said. How many people content themselves with 
speaking, and believe that it exempts them from 
acting ! And those who listen are content with 
having heard them. So it sometimes happens that a 
life may in the end be made up of a few well-turned 
speeches, a few fine books, and a few great plays. 
As for practicing what is so magisterially set forth, 
that is the last thing thought of. And if we pass 
from the world of talent to spheres which the medi* 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 47 

ocre exploit, there, in a pell-mell of confusion, we 
see those who think that we are in the world to talk 
and hear others talk — the great and hopeless rout 
of babblers, of everything that prates, bawls, and per- 
orates and, after all, finds that there isn't talking 
enough. They all forget that those who make the 
least noise do the most work. An engine that ex- 
pends all its steam in whistling, has nothing left with 
which to turn wheels. Then let us cultivate silence. 
All that we can save in noise we gain in power. 

F S ^HESE reflections lead us to consider a 
similar subject, also very worthy of atten- 
-**- tion : I mean what has been called " the 
vice of the superlative." If we study the inhabi- 
tants of a country, we notice differences of tem- 
perament, of which the language shows signs. 
Here the people are calm and phlegmatic ; their 
speech is jejune, lacks color. Elsewhere tempera- 
ments are more evenly balanced ; one finds pre- 
cision, the word exactly fitted to the thing. But 
farther on — effect of the sun, the air, the wine per- 
haps — hot blood courses in the veins, tempers are 
excitable, language is extravagant, and the simplest 
things are said in the strongest terms. 



48 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

If the type of speech varies with climate, it differs 
also with epochs. Compare the language, written 
or spoken, of our own times with that of certain 
other periods of our history. Under the old regime, 
people spoke differently than at the time of the 
Revolution, and we have not the same language as 
the men of 1830, 1848, or the Second Empire. In 
general, language is now characterized by greater 
simplicity : we no longer wear perukes, we no longer 
write in lace frills : but there is one significant differ- 
ence between us and almost all of our ancestors — and 
it is the source of our exaggerations — our nervous- 
ness. Upon over-excited nervous systems — and 
Heaven knows that to have nerves is no longer an 
aristocratic privilege ! — words do not produce the 
same impression as under normal conditions. And 
quite as truly, simple language does not suffice the 
man of over- wrought sensibilities when he tries to 
express what he feels. In private life, in public, in 
books, on the stage, calm and temperate speech has 
given place to excess. The means that novelists and 
playwrights employ to galvanize the public mind 
and compel its attention, are to be found again, in 
their rudiments, in our most commonplace conversa- 
tions, in our letter- writing, and above ail in public 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 49 

speaking. Our performances in language compared 
to those of a man well-balanced and serene, are 
what our hand-writing is compared to that of our 
fathers. The fault is laid to steel pens. If only 
the truth were acknowledged ! — Geese, then, 
could save us ! But the evil goes deeper ; it is 
in ourselves. We write like men possessed : the 
pen of our ancestors was more restful, more sure. 
Here we face one of the results of our modern life, 
so complicated and so terribly exhaustive of energy. 
It leaves us impatient, breathless, in perpetual trepi- 
dation. Our handwriting, like our speech, suffers 
thereby and betrays us. Let us go back from the 
effect to the cause, and understand well the warning 
it brings us ! 

What good can come from this habit of exag- 
gerated speech ? False interpreters of our own im- 
pressions, we can not but warp the minds of our fel- 
low-men as well as our own. Between people who 
exaggerate, good understanding ceases. Ruffled 
tempers, violent and useless disputes, hasty judg- 
ments devoid of all moderation, the utmost extrava- 
gance in education and social life — these things are 
the result of intemperance of speech. 




50 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

"AY I be permitted, in this appeal for 
simplicity of speech, to frame a wish 
whose fulfilment would have the hap- 
piest results ? I ask for simplicity in literature, not 
only as one of the best remedies for the dejection 
of our souls — biases, jaded, w r eary of eccentricities- — 
but also as a pledge and source of social union. 
I ask also for simplicity in art. Our art and our 
literature are reserved for the privileged few of ed- 
ucation and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. 
I do not ask poets, novelists, and painters to de- 
scend from the heights and walk along the moun- 
tain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity ; 
but, on the contrary, to mount higher. The truly 
popular is not that which appeals to a certain 
class of society ordinarily called the common peo- 
ple ; the truly popular is what is common to all 
classes and unites them. The sources of inspiration 
from which perfect art springs are in the depths of 
the human heart, in the eternal realities of life 
before which all men are equal. And the sources 
of a popular language must be found in the small 
number of simple and vigorous forms which ex- 
press elementary sensations, and draw the mas- 
ter lines of human destiny. In them are truth, 



SIMPLICITY OF SPEECH 51 

power, grandeur, immortality. Is there not enough 
in such an ideal to kindle the enthusiasm of youth, 
which, sensible that the sacred flame of the beautiful 
is burning within, feels pity, and to the disdainful 
adage, Odi profanum vidgus, prefers this more hu- 
mane saying, Misereor super turbam. As for me, I 
have no artistic authority, but from out the multi- 
tude where I live, I have the right to raise my cry 
to those who have been given talents, and say to 
them : Labor for men whom the world forgets, make 
yourselves intelligible to the humble, so shall you 
accomplish a work of emancipation and peace; so 
shall you open again the springs whence those mas- 
ters drew, whose works have defied the ages because 
they knew how to clothe genius in simplicity. 



SIMPLE DUTY 

WHEN we talk to children on a sub- 
ject that annoys them, fchey call our 
attention to some pigeon on the 
roof, giving food to its little one, or 
some coachman down in the street who is abusing 
his horse. Sometimes they even maliciously pro- 
pose one of those alarming questions that put the 
minds of parents on the rack ; all this to divert 
attention from the distressing topic. I fear that in 
the face of duty we are big children, and, when that 
is the theme, seek subterfuges to distract us. 

The first sophism consists in asking ourselves if 
there is such a thing as duty in the abstract, or if 
this word does not cover one of the numerous illu- 
sions of our forefathers. For duty, in truth, sup- 
poses liberty, and the question of liberty leads us 
into metaphysics. How can we talk of liberty so 
long as this grave problem of free-will is not solved ? 

Theoretically there is no objection to this ; and if 

52 



SIMPLE DUTY 58 

life were a theory, and we were here to work out a 
complete system of the universe, it would be absurd 
to concern ourselves with duty until we had clarified 
the subject of liberty, determined its conditions, 
fixed its limits. 

But life is not a theory. In this question of prac- 
tical morality, as in the others, life has preceded 
hypothesis, and there is no room to believe that she 
ever yields it place. This liberty — relative, I admit, 
iike everything we are acquainted with, for that 
matter — this duty whose existence we question, is 
none the less the basis of all the judgments we 
pass upon ourselves and our fellow-men. We hold 
each other to a certain extent responsible for our 
deeds and exploits. 

The most ardent theorist, once outside of his 
theory, scruples not a whit to approve or disapprove 
the acts of others, to take measures against his ene- 
mies, to appeal to the generosity and justice of 
those he would dissuade from an unworthy step. 
One can no more rid himself of the notion of moral 
obligation than of that of time or space ; and as 
surely as we must resign ourselves to walking before 
we know how to define this space through which we 
move and this time that measures our movements, 



54 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

so surely must we submit to moral obligation before 
having put our finger on its deep-hidden roots. 
Moral law dominates man, whether he respects or 
defies it. See how it is in every-day life: each one 
is ready to cast his stone at him who neglects a 
plain duty, even if he allege that he has not yet 
arrived at philosophic certitude. Everybody will 
say to him, and with excellent reason : " Sir, we 
are men before everything. First play your part, do 
your duty as citizen, father, son ; after that you 
shall return to the course of your meditations/ ' 

However, let us be well understood. We should 
not wish to turn anyone away from scrupulous 
research into the foundations of morality. No 
thought which leads men to concern themselves 
once more with these grave questions, could be 
useless or indifferent. We simply challenge the 
thinker to find a way to wait till he has unearthed 
these foundations, before he does an act of human- 
ity, of honesty or dishonesty, of valor or cowardice. 
And most of all do we wish to formulate a reply for 
all the insincere who have never tried to philoso- 
phize, and for ourselves when we would offer our 
state of philosophic doubt in justification of our 
practical omissions. From the simple fact that we 



SIMPLE DUTY 55 

are meiij before all theorizing, positive,, or negative, 
about duty, we have the peremptory law to conduct 
ourselves like men. There is no getting out of it. 

But he little knows the resources of the human 
heart, who counts on the effect of such a reply. It 
matters not that it is itself unanswerable ; it cannot 
keep other questions from arising. The sum of our 
pretexts for evading duty is equal to the sum of the 
sands of the sea or the stars of heaven. 

We take refuge, then, behind duty that is obscure, 
difficult, contradictory. And these are certainly 
words to call up painful memories. To be a man of 
duty and to question one's route, grope in the dark, 
feel one's self torn between the contrary solicita- 
tions of conflicting calls, or again, to face a duty 
gigantic, overwhelming, beyond our strength — 
what is harder ! And such things happen. We 
would neither deny nor contest the tragedy in cer- 
tain situations or the anguish of certain lives. And 
yet, duty rarely has to make itself plain across such 
conflicting circumstances, or to be struck out from 
the tortured mind like lightning from a storm-cloud. 
Such formidable shocks are exceptional. Well for 
us if we stand staunch when they come ! But if no 
one is astonished that oaks are uprooted by the 



56 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

whirlwind, that a wayfarer stumbles at night on an 
unknown road, or that a soldier caught between two 
fires is vanquished, no more should he condemn 
without appeal those who have been worsted in 
almost superhuman moral conflicts. To succumb 
under the force of numbers or obstacles has never 
been counted a disgrace. 

So my weapons are at the service of those who 
intrench themselves behind the impregnable ram- 
part of duty ill-defined, complicated or contradictory. 
But it is not that which occupies me to-day ; it is 
of plain, I had almost said easy duty, that I wish 
to speak. 

WE have yearly three or four high feast 
days, and many ordinary ones : there 
are likewise some very great and dark 
combats to wage, but beside these is the multitude 
of plain and simple duties. Now, while in the 
great encounters our equipment is generally ade- 
quate, it is precisely in the little emergencies that 
we are found wanting. Without fear of being mis- 
led by a paradoxical form of thought, I affirm, then, 
that the essential thing is to fulfil our simple duties 
and exercise elementary justice. In general, those 



SIMPLE DUTY 57 

who lose their souls do so not because they fail to 
rise to difficult duty, but because they neglect to 
perform that which is simple. Let us illustrate this 
truth. 

He who tries to penetrate into the humble under- 
world of society is not slow to discover great misery, 
physical and moral. And the closer he looks, the 
greater number of unfortunates does he discover, till 
in the end this assembly of the wretched appears to 
him like a great black world, in whose presence the 
individual and his means of relief are reduced to 
helplessness. It is true that he feels impelled to 
run to the succor of these unfortunates, but at the 
same time he asks himself, "What is the use?*' 
The case is certainly heartrending. Some, in despair, 
end by doing nothing. They lack neither pity nor 
good intention, but these bear no fruit. They are 
wrong. Often a man has not the means to do good 
on a large scale, but that is not a reason for failing 
to do it at all. So many people absolve themselves 
from any action, on the ground that there is too 
much to do ! They should be recalled to simple 
duty, and this duty in the case of which we speak 
is that each one, according to his resources, leisure 
and capacity, should create relations for himself among 



58 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

the world's disinherited. There are people who by 
the exercise of a little good-will have succeeded in en- 
rolling themselves among the followers of ministers, 
and have ingratiated themselves with princes. Why 
should you not succeed in forming relations with 
the poor, and in making acquaintances among the 
workers who lack somewhat the necessities of life ? 
When a few families are known, with their histories, 
their antecedents and their difficulties, you may be 
of the greatest use to them by acting the part of a 
brother, with the moral and material aid that is yours 
to give. It is true, you will have attacked only one 
little corner, but you will have done what you 
could, and pernaps have led another on to follow 
3^ou. Instead of stopping at the knowledge that 
much wretchedness, hatred, disunion and vice exist 
in society, you will have introduced a little good 
among these evils. And by however slow degrees 
such kindness as yours is emulated, the good will 
sensibly increase and the evil diminish. Even were 
you to remain alone in this undertaking, you would 
have the assurance that in fulfilling the duty, plain 
as a child's, which offered itself, you were doing the 
only reasonable thing. If you have felt it so, you 
have found out one of the secrets of right living. 



SIMPLE DUTY 59 

In its dreams, man's ambition embraces vast 
limits, but it is rarely given us to achieve great 
things, and even then, a quick and sure success 
always rests on a groundwork of patient preparation. 
Fidelity in small things is at the base of every great 
achievement. We too often forget this, and yet 
no truth needs more to be kept in mind, particularly 
in the troubled eras of history and in the crises of 
individual life. In shipwreck a splintered beam, an 
oar, any scrap of wreckage, saves us. On the tum- 
bling waves of life, when everything seems shat- 
tered to fragments, let us not forget that a single one 
of these poor bits may become our plank of safety. 
To despise the remnants is demoralization. 

You are a ruined man, or you are stricken by a 
great bereavement, or again, you see the fruit oi 
toilsome years perish before your eyes. You can- 
not rebuild your fortune, raise the dead, recover 
your lost toil, and in the face of the inevitable, 
your arms drop. Then you neglect to care for your 
person, to keep your house, to guide your children. 
All this is pardonable, and how easy to understand ! 
But it is exceedingly dangerous. To fold one's 
hands and let things take their course, is to trans- 
form one evil into worse. You who think that vou 



60 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

have nothing left to lose, will by that very thought 
lose what you have. Gather up the fragments that 
remain to you, and keep them with scrupulous care. 
In good time this little that is yours will be your 
consolation. The effort made will come to your 
relief, as the effort missed will turn against you. If 
nothing but a branch is left for you to cling to, 
cling to that branch ; and if you stand alone in 
defense of a losing cause, do not throw down your 
arms to join the rout. After the deluge a few sur 
vivors repeopled the earth. The future sometimes 
rests in a single life as truly as life sometimes hangs 
by a thread. For strength, go to history and Nature. 
From the long travail of both you will learn that 
failure and fortune alike may come from the slight- 
est cause, that it is not wise to neglect detail, and, 
above all, that we must know how to wait and to 
begin again. 

In speaking of simple duty I cannot help think- 
ing of military life, and the examples it offers to 
combatants in this great struggle. He would little 
understand his soldier's duty who, the army once 
beaten, should cease to brush his garments, polish 
his rifle, and observe discipline. " But what would 
be the use ?" perhaps you ask. Are there not vari- 



SIMPLE DUT¥ 61 

ous fashions of being vanquished ? Is it an indif- 
ferent matter to add to defeat, discouragement, dis- 
order, and demoralization ? No, it should never be 
forgotten that the least display of energy in these 
terrible moments is a sign of life and hope. At 
once everybody feels that all is not lost. 

During the disastrous retreat of 1813-1814, in 
the heart of the winter, when it had become almost 
impossible to present any sort of appearance, a gen- 
eral, I know not who, one morning presented him- 
self to Napoleon, in full dress and freshly shaven. 
Seeing him thus, in the midst of the general de- 
moralization, as elaborately attired as if for parade, 
the Emperor said : My general, you are a brave man J 

AGAIN, the plain duty is the near duty. A 
very common weakness keeps many peo- 
ple from finding what is near them inter- 
esting ; they see that only on its paltry side. The 
distant, on the contrary, draws and fascinates them. 
In this way a fabulous amount of good-will is wasted. 
People burn with ardor for humanity, for the pub- 
lic good, for righting distant wrongs ; they walk 
through life, their eyes fixed on marvelous sights 
along the horizon, treading meanwhile on the feet 



62 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

of passers-by, or jostling them without being aware 
of their existence. 

Strange infirmity, that keeps us from seeing our 
fellows at our very doors ! People widely read and 
far-travelled are often not acquainted with their 
fellow-citizens, great or small. Their lives depend 
upon the cooperation of a multitude of beings 
whose lot remains to them quite indifferent. Not 
those to whom they owe their knowledge and cul- 
ture, not their rulers, nor those who serve them and 
supply their needs, have ever attracted their atten- 
tion. That there is ingratitude or improvidence in 
not knowing one's workmen, one's servants, all those 
in short with whom one has indispensable social re- 
lations — this has never come into their minds. 
Others go much farther. To certain wives, their 
husbands are strangers, and conversely. There are 
parents who do not know their children : their 
development, their thoughts, the dangers they run, 
the hopes they cherish, are to them a closed book. 
Many children do not know their parents, have no 
suspicion of their difficulties and struggles, no con- 
ception of their aims. And I am not speaking of 
those piteously disordered homes where all the rela- 
tions are false, but of honorable families. Only, 



SIMPLE DUTY 63 

all these people are greatly preoccupied : each has 
his outside interest that fills all his time. The dis- 
tant duty — very attractive, I don't deny — claims 
them entirely, and they are not conscious of the 
duty near at hand. I fear they will have their 
trouble for their pains. Each person's base of 
operations is the field of his immediate duty. 
Neglect this field, and all you undertake at a dis- 
tance is compromised. First, then, be of your own 
country, your own city, your own home, your own 
church, your own work-shop ; then, if you can, set 
out from this to go beyond it. That is the plain 
and natural order, and a man must fortify himself 
with very bad reasons to arrive at reversing it. At 
all events, the result of so strange a confusion of 
duties is that many people employ their time in 
all sorts of affairs except those in which we have a 
right to demand it. Each is occupied with some- 
thing else than what concerns him, is absent from 
his post, ignores his trade. This is what compli- 
cates life. And it would be so simple for each one 
to be about his own matter. 



64 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

ANOTHER form of simple duty. When 
damage is done, who should repair it? 
He who did it. This is just, but it is 
only theory, and the consequence of following the 
theory would be the evil in force until the malefac- 
tors were found and had offset it. But suppose 
they are not found ? or suppose they can not or will 
not make amends ? 

The rain falls on your head through a hole in the 
roof, or the wind blows in at a broken window. Will 
you wait to find the man who caused the mischief? 
You would certainly think that absurd. And yet 
such is often the practice. Children indignantly 
protest, "I didn't put it there, and I shall not take 
it away ! " And most men reason after the same 
fashion. It is logic. But it is not the kind of logic 
that makes the world move forward. 

On the contrary, what we must learn, and what 
life repeats to us daily, is that the injury done by 
one must be repaired by another. One tears down, 
another builds up ; one defaces, another restores ; 
one stirs up quarrels, another appeases them ; one 
makes tears to flow, another wipes them away ; one 
lives for evil-doing, another dies for the right. And 
in the workings of this grievous law lies salvation. 



SIMPLE DUTY 65 

This also is logic, but a logic of facts which makes 
the logic of theories pale. The conclusion of the 
matter is not doubtful ; a single-hearted man draws 
it thus : given the evil, the great thing is to make 
it good, and to set about it on the spot ; well indeed 
if Messrs. the Malefactors will contribute to the 
reparation ; but experience warns us not to count 
too much on their aid. 

BUT however simple duty may be, there is 
still need of strength to do it. In what 
does this strength consist, or where is it 
found ? One could scarcely tire of asking. Duty 
is for man an enemy and an intruder, so long as it 
appears as an appeal from without. When it comes 
in through the door, he leaves by the window ; 
when it blocks up the windows, he escapes by the 
roof. The more plainly we see it coming, the more 
surely we flee. It is like those police, representa- 
tives of public order and official justice, whom an 
adroit thief succeeds in evading. Alas ! the officer, 
though he finally collar the thief, can only conduct 
him to the station, not along the right road. 
Before man is able to accomplish his duty, he must 
fall into the hands of another power than that which 



66 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

says, " Do this, do that ; shun this, shun that, of 
else beware ! " 

This is an interior power ; it is love. When a man 
hates his work, or goes about it with indifference, all 
the forces of earth cannot make him follow it with 
enthusiasm. But he who loves his office moves of 
himself; not only is it needless to compel him, but 
it would be impossible to turn him aside. And this 
is true of everybody. The great thing is to have 
felt the sanctity and immortal beauty in our obscure 
destiny ; to have been led by a series of experiences 
to love this life for its griefs and its hopes, to love 
men for their weakness and their greatness, and to 
belong to humanity through the heart, the intelli- 
gence and the soul. Then an unknown power takes 
possession of us, as the wind of the sails of a ship, 
and bears us toward pity and justice. And yielding 
to its irresistible impulse, we say : / cannot help it> 
something is there stronger than I. In so saying, the 
men of all times and places have designated a 
power that is above humanity, but which may dwelJ 
in men's hearts. And everything truly lofty within 
us appears to us as a manifestation of this mystery 
beyond. Noble feelings, like great thoughts and 
deeds, are things of inspiration. When the tree 



SIMPLE DUTY 67 

buds and bears fruit, it is because it draws vital 
forces from the soil, and receives light and warmth 
from the sun. If a man, in his humble sphere, in 
the midst of the ignorance and faults that are his 
inevitably, consecrates himself sincerely to his task, 
it is because he is in contact with the eternal source 
of goodness. This central force manifests itself un- 
der a thousand forms. Sometimes it is indomitable 
energy ; sometimes winning tenderness ; sometimes 
the militant spirit that grasps and uproots the evil ; 
sometimes maternal solicitude, gathering to its arms 
from the wayside where it was perishing, some 
bruised and forgotten life ; sometimes the humble 
patience of long research. All that it touches bears 
its seal, and the men it inspires know that through 
it we live and have our being. To serve it is their 
pleasure and reward. They are satisfied to be its 
instruments, and they no longer look at the outward 
glory of their office, well knowing that nothing is 
great, nothing small, but that our life and our deeds 
are only of worth because of the spirit which breathes 
through them. 



VI 

SIMPLE NEEDS 

WHEN we buy a bird of the fancier, 
the good man tells us briefly what is 
necessary for our new pensioner, 
and the whole thing — hygiene, 
food, and the rest — is comprehended in a dozen 
words. Likewise, to sum up the necessities of most 
men, a few concise lines would answer. Their 
regime is in general of supreme simplicity, and so 
long as they follow it, all is well with them, as with 
every obedient child of Mother Nature. Let them 
depart from it, complications arise, health fails, 
gayety vanishes. Only simple and natural living can 
keep a body in full vigor. Instead of remembering 
this basic principle, we fall into the strangest aber- 
rations. 

What material things does a man need to live 
under the best conditions ? A healthful diet, simple 
clothing, a sanitary dwelling-place, air and exercise. 

I am not going to enter into hygienic details, com- 

68 



SIMPLE NEEDS 69 

pose menus, or discuss model tenements and dress 
reform. My aim is to point out a direction and 
tell what advantage would come to each of us from 
ordering his life in a spirit of simplicity. To know 
that this spirit does not rule in our society we need 
but watch the lives of men of all classes. Ask 
different people, of very unlike surroundings, this 
question : What do you need to live ? You will 
see how they respond. Nothing is more instructive. 
For some aboriginals of the Parisian asphalt, there 
is no life possible outside a region bounded by cer- 
tain boulevards. There one finds the respirable air, 
the illuminating light, normal heat, classic cookery, 
and, in moderation, so many other things without 
which it would not be worth the while to prom- 
enade this round ball. 

On the various rungs of the bourgeois ladder 
people reply to the question, what is necessary to 
live ? by figures varying with the degree of their 
ambition or education : and by education is oftenest 
understood the outward customs of life, the style of 
house, dress, table — an education precisely skin- 
deep. Upward from a certain income, fee, or salary, 
life becomes possible : below that it is impossible. 
We have seen men commit suicide because their 



70 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

means had fallen under a certain minimum. They 
preferred to disappear rather than retrench. Ob- 
serve that this minimum, the cause of their despair, 
would have been sufficient for others of less exact- 
ing needs, and enviable to men whose tastes are 
modest. 

On lofty mountains vegetation changes with the 
altitude. There is the region of ordinary flora, that 
of the forests, that o^ pastures, that of bare rocks 
and glaciers. Above a certain zone wheat is no 
longer found, but the vine still prospers. The oak 
ceases in the low regions, the pine flourishes at con- 
siderable heights. Human life, with its needs, re- 
minds one of these phenomena of vegetation. 

At a certain altitude of fortune the financier 
thrives, the club-man, the society woman, all those 
in short for whom the strictly necessary includes a 
certain number of domestics and equipages, as well 
as several town and country houses. Further on 
flourishes the rich upper middle class, with its own 
standards and life. In other regions we find men 
of ample, moderate, or small means, and very unlike 
exigencies. Then come the people — artisans, day- 
laborers, peasants, in short, the masses, who live 
dense and serried like the thick, sturdy growths on 



SIMPLE NEEDS 71 

the summits of the mountains, where the larger 
vegetation can no longer find nourishment. In all 
these different regions of society men live, and no 
matter in which particular regions they flourish, all 
are alike human beings, bearing the same mark. 
How strange that among fellows there should be 
such a prodigious difference in requirements ! And 
here the analogies of our comparison fail us. Plants 
and animals of the same families have identical 
wants. In human life we observe quite the con- 
trary. What conclusion shall we draw from this, if 
not that with us there is a considerable elasticity 
in the nature and number of needs ? 

Is it well, is it favorable to the development of 
the individual and his happiness, and to the devel- 
opment and happiness of society, that man should 
have a multitude of needs, and bend his energies to 
their satisfaction ? Let us return for a moment to 
our comparison with inferior beings. Provided that 
their essential wants are satisfied, they live content. 
Is this true of men ? No. In all classes of society 
we find discontent. I leave completely out of the 
question those who lack the necessities of life. One 
cannot with justice count in the number of mal- 
contents those from whom hunger, cold, and misery 



72 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

wring complaints. I am considering now that mul- 
titude of people who live under conditions at least 
supportable. Whence comes their heart-burning ? 
Why is it found not only among those of modest 
though sufficient means, but also under shades of 
ever-increasing .refinement, all along the ascending 
scale, even to opulence and the summits of social 
place? They talk of the contented middle classes. 
Who talk of them ? People who, judging from with- 
out, think that as soon as one begins to enjoy ease he 
ought to be satisfied. But the middle classes them- 
selves — do they consider themselves satisfied ? Not 
the least in the world. If there are people at once 
rich and content, be assured that they are content be- 
cause they know how to be so, not because they are 
rich. An animal is satisfied when it has eaten ; it 
lies down and sleeps. A man also can lie down and 
sleep for a time, but it never lasts. When he be- 
comes accustomed to this contentment, he tires of it 
and demands a greater. Man's appetite is not ap- 
peased by food ; it increases with eating. This may 
seem absurd, but it is strictly true. 

And the fact that those who make the most out- 
cry are almost always those who should find the 
best reasons for contentment, proves unquestionably 



SIMPLE NEEDS 73 

that happiness is not allied to the number of our 
needs and the zeal we put into their cultivation. It 
is for everyone's interest to let this truth sink deep 
into his mind. If it does not, if he does not by- 
decisive action succeed in limiting his needs, he 
risks a descent, insensible and beyond retreat, along 
the declivity of desire. 

He who lives to eat, drink, sleep, dress, take his 
walk, — in short, pamper himself all that he can — be 
it the courtier basking in the sun, the drunken 
laborer, the commoner serving his belly, the woman 
absorbed in her toilettes, the profligate of low estate 
or high, or simply the ordinary pleasure-lover, a 
" good fellow," but too obedient to material needs 
— that man or woman is on the downward way of 
desire, and the descent is fatal. Those who follow 
it obey the same laws as a body on an inclined 
plane. Dupes of an illusion forever repeated, they 
think : " Just a few steps more, the last, toward the 
thing down there that we covet; then we will halt." 
But the velocity they gain sweeps them on, and the 
further they go the less able they are to resist it. 

Here is the secret of the unrest, the madness, of 
many of our contemporaries. Having condemned 
their will to the service of their appetites, they 



74 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

suffer the penalty. They are delivered up to violent 
passions which devour their flesh, crush their bones, 
suck their blood, and cannot be sated. This is not 
a lofty moral denunciation. I have been listening 
to what life says, and have recorded, as I heard 
them, some of the truths that resound in every 
square. 

Has drunkenness, inventive as it is of new drinks, 
found the means of quenching thirst ? Not at all. 
It might rather be called the art of making thirst 
inextinguishable. Frank l^bertinage, does it deaden 
the sting of the senses ? No ; it envenoms it, con- 
verts natural desire into a morbid obsession and 
makes it the dominant passion. Let your needs 
rule you, pamper them — you will see them multi- 
ply like insects in the sun. The more you give 
them, the more they demand. He is senseless who 
seeks for happiness in material prosperity alone. 
As well undertake to fill the cask of the Danaides. 
To those who have millions, millions are wanting ; 
to those who have thousands, thousands. Others 
lack a twenty-franc piece or a hundred sous. When 
they have a chicken in the pot, they ask for a 
goose ; when they have the goose, they wish it were 
a turkey, and so on. We shall never learn how 



SIMPLE NEEDS 75 

fatal this tendency is. There are too many humble 
people who wish to imitate the great, too many poor 
working-men who ape the well-to-do middle classes, 
too many shop-girls who play at being ladies, too 
many clerks who act the club -man or sportsman ; 
and among those in easy circumstances and the rich, 
are too many people who forget that what they 
possess could serve a better purpose than procuring 
pleasure for themselves, only to find in the end 
that one never has enough. Our needs, in place of 
the servants that they should be, have become a 
turbulent and seditious crowd, a legion of tyrants 
in miniature. A man enslaved to his needs may 
best be compared to a bear with a ring in its nose, 
that is led about and made to dance at will. The 
likeness is not flattering, but you will grant that it 
is true. It is in the train of their own needs that 
so many of those men are dragged along who rant 
for liberty, progress, and I don't know what else. 
They cannot take a step without asking them- 
selves if it might not irritate their masters. How 
many men and women have gone on and on, even 
to dishonesty, for the sole reason that they had too 
many needs and could not resign themselves to 
simple living ! There are many guests in the chain- 



76 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

bers of Mazas who could give us much light on the 
subject of too exigent needs. 

Let me tell you the story of an excellent man 
whom I knew. He tenderly loved his wife and 
children, and they all lived together, in France, in 
comfort and plenty, but with little of the luxury 
the wife coveted. Always short of money, though 
with a little management he might have been at 
ease, he ended by exiling himself to a distant 
colony, leaving his wife and children in the mother 
country. I don't know how the poor man can 
feel off there ; but his family has a finer apartment, 
more beautiful toilettes, and what passes for an 
equipage. At present they are perfectly contented, 
but soon they will be used to this luxury — rudi- 
mentary after all. Then Madam will find her furni- 
ture common and her equipage mean. If this man 
loves his wife — and that cannot be doubted — he 
will migrate to the moon if there is hope of a larger 
stipend. In other cases the roles are reversed, and 
the wife and children are sacrificed to the ravenous 
needs of the head of the family, whom an irregular 
life, play, and countless other costly follies have 
robbed of all dignity. Between his appetites and 
his role of father he has decided for the former. 



SIMPLE NEEDS 77 

and he slowly drifts toward the most abject 
egoism. 

This forgetfulness of all responsibility, this 
gradual benumbing of noble feeling, is not alone to 
be found among pleasure-seekers of the upper 
classes : the people also are infected. I know more 
than one little household, which ought to be happy, 
where the mother has only pain and heartache day 
and night, the children are barefoot, and there is 
great ado for bread. Why? Because too much 
money is needed by the father. To speak only of 
the expenditure for alcohol, everybody knows the 
proportions that has reached in the last twenty years. 
The sums swallowed up in this gulf are fabulous — 
twice the indemnity of the war of 1870. How 
many legitimate needs could have been satisfied 
with that which has been thrown away on these 
artificial ones ! The reign of wants is by no means 
the reign of brotherhood. The more things a man 
desires for himself, the less he can do for his neigh- 
bor, and even for those attached to him by ties of 
blood. 



78 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

THE destruction of happiness, independ- 
ence, moral fineness, even of the senti- 
ment of common interests — such is the 
result of the reign of needs. A multitude of other 
unfortunate things might be added, of which not 
the least is the disturbance of the public welfare. 
When society has too great needs, it is absorbed 
with the present, sacrifices to it the conquests of the 
past, immolates to it the future. After us the 
deluge ! To raze the forests in order to get gold ; 
to squander your patrimony in youth, destroying in a 
day the fruit of long years ; to warm your house by 
burning your furniture ; to burden the future with 
debts for the sake of present pleasure; to live by 
expedients and sow for the morrow trouble, sickness, 
ruin, envy and hate — the enumeration of all the 
misdeeds of this fatal regime has no end. 

On the other hand, if we hold to simple needs 
we avoid all these evils and replace them by meas- 
ureless good. That temperance and sobriety are 
the best guardians of health is an old story. They 
spare him who observes them many a misery that 
saddens existence ; they insure him health, love of 
action, mental poise. Whether it be a question of 
food, dress, or dwelling, simplicity of taste is also a 



SIMPLE NEEDS 79 

source of independence and safety. The more sim- 
ply you live, the more secure is your future ; you 
are less at the mercy of surprises and reverses. An 
illness or a period of idleness does not suffice to dis- 
possess you : a change of position, even consider- 
able, does not put you to confusion. Having simple 
needs, you find it less painful to accustom yourself 
to the hazards of fortune. You remain a man, 
though you lose your office or your income, because 
the foundation on which your life rests is not your 
table, your cellar, your horses, your goods and 
chattels, or your money. In adversity you will not 
act like a nursling deprived of its bottle and rattle. 
Stronger, better armed for the struggle, presenting, 
like those with shaven heads, less advantage to the 
hands of your enemy, you will also be of more profit 
to your neighbor. For you will not rouse his jeal- 
ousy, his base desires or his censure, by your luxury, 
your prodigality, or the spectacle of a sycophant's 
life ; and, less absorbed in your own comfort, you 
will find the means of working for that of others. 



VII 

SIMPLE PLEASURES 

DO you find life amusing in these days ? 
For my part, on the whole, it seems 
rather depressing, and I fear that my 
opinion is not altogether personal. As 
I observe the lives of my contemporaries, and listen 
to their talk, I find myself unhappily confirmed in 
the opinion that they do not get much pleasure out 
of things. And certainly it is not from lack of try- 
ing ; but it must be acknowledged that their success 
is meagre. Where can the fault be ? 

Some accuse politics or business ; others social 
problems or militarism. We meet only an embar- 
rassment of choice when we start to unstring the 
chaplet of our carking cares. Suppose we set out 
in pursuit of pleasure. There is too much pep- 
per in our soup to make it palatable. Our arms are 
filled with a multitude of embarrassments, any one 
of which would be enough to spoil our temper. 

From morning till night, wherever we go, the people 

80 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 81 

we meet are hurried, worried, preoccupied. Some 
have spilt their good blood in the miserable con- 
flicts of petty politics : others are disheartened by 
the meanness and jealousy they have encountered 
in the world of literature or art. Commercial com- 
petition troubles the sleep of not a few. The 
crowded curricula of study and the exigencies of 
their opening careers, spoil life for young men. 
The working classes suffer the consequences of a 
ceaseless industrial struggle. It is becoming disa- 
greeable to govern, because authority is diminish- 
ing ; to teach, because respect is vanishing. Wher- 
ever one turns there is matter for discontent. 

And yet history shows us certain epochs of up- 
heaval which were as lacking in idyllic tranquillity as 
is our own, but which the gravest events did not 
prevent from being gay. It even seems as if the 
seriousness of affairs, the uncertainty of the morrow, 
the violence of social convulsions, sometimes became 
a new source of vitality. It is not a rare thing to 
hear soldiers singing between two battles, and I 
think myself nowise mistaken in saying that human 
joy has celebrated its finest triumphs under the 
greatest tests of endurance. But to sleep peacefully 
on the eve of. battle or to exult at the stake, men had 



82 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

then the stimulus of an internal harmony which we 
perhaps lack. Joy is not in things, it is in us, and 
I hold to the belief that the causes of our present 
unrest, of this contagious discontent spreading 
everywhere, are in us at least as much as in exterior 
conditions. 

To give one's self up heartily to diversion one 
must feel himself on a solid basis, must believe in 
]ife and find it within him. And here lies our weak- 
ness. So many of us — even, alas ! the younger 
men — are at variance with life ; and I do not 
speak of philosophers only. How do you think a 
man can be amused while he has his doubts whether 
after all life is worth living ? Besides this, one ob- 
serves a disquieting depression of vital force, which 
must be attributed to the abuse man makes of his 
sensations. Excess of all kinds has blurred our 
senses and poisoned our faculty for happiness. 
Human nature succumbs under the irregularities im- 
posed upon it. Deeply attainted at its root, the 
desire to live, persistent in spite of everything, seeks 
satisfaction in cheats and baubles. In medical sci- 
ence we have recourse to artificial respiration, arti- 
ficial alimentation, and galvanism. So, too, around 
expiring pleasure we see a crowd of its votaries, ex- 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 83 

erting themselves to reawaken it, to reanimate it. 
Most ingenious means have been invented ; it can 
never be said that expense has been spared. Every- 
thing has been tried, the possible and the impossi- 
ble. But in all these complicated alembics no one 
has ever arrived at distilling a drop of veritable joy. 
We must not confound pleasure with the instru- 
ments of pleasure. To be a painter, does it suffice 
to arm one's self with a brush, or does the purchase 
at great cost of a Stradivarius make one a musician ? 
No more, if you had the whole paraphernalia of 
amusement in the perfection of its ingenuity, would 
it advance you upon your road. But with a bit of 
crayon a great artist makes an immortal sketch. 
It needs talent or genius to paint ; and to amuse 
one's self, the faculty of being happy : whoever pos- 
sesses it is amused at slight cost. This faculty is 
destroyed by scepticism, artificial living, over-abuse ; 
it is fostered by confidence, moderation and normal 
habits of thought and action. 

An excellent proof of my proposition, and one very 
easily encountered, lies in the fact that wherever 
life is simple and sane, true pleasure accompanies it 
as fragrance does uncultivated flowers. Be this life 
hard, hampered, devoid of all things ordinarily con- 



84 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

sidered as the very conditions of pleasure, trie rare 
and delicate plant, joy, flourishes there. It springs 
up between the flags of the pavement, on an arid 
wall, in the fissure of a rock. We ask ourselves how 
it comes, and whence : but it lives ; while in the 
soft warmth of conservatories or in fields richly fer- 
tilized you cultivate it at a golden cost to see it 
fade and die in your hand. 

Ask actors what audience is happiest at the play ; 
they will tell you the popular one. The reason is 
not hard to grasp. To these people the play is an 
exception, they are not bored by it from over-indul- 
gence. And, too, to them it is a rest from rude toil. 
The pleasure they enjoy they have honestly earned, 
and they know its cost as they know that of each 
sou earned by the sweat of their labor. More, they 
have not frequented the wings, they have no in- 
trigues with the actresses, they do not see the 
wires pulled. To them it is all real. And so they 
feel pleasure unalloyed. I think I see the sated 
sceptic, whose monocle glistens in that box, cast a 
disdainful glance over the smiling crowd. 

" Poor stupid creatures, ignorant and gross * " 
And yet they are the true livers, while he is an 
artificial product, a mannikin, incapable of experi- 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 85 

encing this fine and salutary intoxication of an hour 
of frank pleasure. 

Unhappily, ingenuousness is disappearing, even in 
the rural districts. We see the people of our cit- 
ies, and those of the country in their turn, break- 
ing with the good traditions. The mind, warped by 
alcohol, by the passion for gambling, and by unhealthy 
literature, contracts little by little perverted tastes. 
Artificial life makes irruption into communities once 
simple in their pleasures, and it is like phylloxera to 
the vine. The robust tree of rustic joy finds its sap 
drained, its leaves turning yellow. 

Compare a fete champetre of the good old style 
with the village festivals, so-called, of to-day. In 
the one case, in the honored setting of antique cos- 
tumes, genuine countrymen sing the folk songs, 
dance rustic dances, regale themselves with native 
drinks, and seem entirely in their element. They 
take their pleasure as the blacksmith forges, as the 
cascade tumbles over the rocks, as the colts frisk 
in the meadows. It is contagious : it stirs your 
heart. In spite of yourself you are ready to cry : 
" Bravo, my children. That is fine ! " You want 
to join in. In the other case, you see villagers dis- 
guised as city folk, countrywomen made hideous 



HG . THE SIMPLE LIFE 

by the modiste, and, as the chief ornament of the 
festival, a lot of degenerates who bawl the songs of 
music halls ; and sometimes in the place of honor, 
a group of tenth-rate barnstormers, imported for the 
occasion, to civilize these rustics and give them a taste 
of refined pleasures. For drinks, liquors mixed with 
brandy or absinthe : in the whole thing neither origi- 
nality nor picturesqueness. License, indeed, and • 
clownishness, but not that abandon which ingenuous 
joy brings in its train. 

THIS question of pleasure is capital. Staid 
people generally neglect it as a frivolity : 
utilitarians, as a costly superfluity, Those 
whom we designate as pleasure-seekers forage in 
this delicate domain like wild boars in a garden. 
No one seems to doubt the immense human interest 
attached to joy. It is a sacred flame that must be 
fedj and that throws a splendid radiance over life. 
He who takes pains to foster it accomplishes a 
work as profitable for humanity as he who builds 
bridges, pierces tunnels, or cultivates the ground. 
So to order one's life as to keep, amid toils and suf- 
fering, the faculty of happiness, and be able to prop- 
agate it in a sort of salutary contagion among one'? 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 87 

fellow-men, is to do a work of fraternity in the 
noblest sense. To give a trifling pleasure, smooth 
an anxious brow, bring a little light into dark paths 
— what a truly divine office in the midst of this 
poor humanity ! But it is only in great simplicity 
of heart that one succeeds in filling it. 

We are not simple enough to be happy and to 
render others so. We lack the singleness of heart 
and the self-forgetfulness. We spread joy, as we 
do consolation, by such methods as to obtain nega- 
tive results. To console a person, what do we do ? 
We set to work to dispute his suffering, persuade 
him that he is mistaken in thinking himself 
unhappy. In reality, our language translated into 
truthful speech would amount to this : " You suf- 
fer, my friend ? That is strange ; you must be mis- 
taken, for I feel nothing." As the only human 
means of soothing grief is to share it in the heart, 
how must a sufferer feel, consoled in this fashion ? 

To divert our neighbor, make him pass an agree- 
able hour, we set out in the same way. We invite 
him to admire our versatility, to laugh at our wit, to 
frequent our house, to sit at our table ; through it 
all, our desire to shine breaks forth. Sometimes, 
also, with a patron's prodigality, we offer him the 



88 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

beneficence of a public entertainment of our own 
choosing, unless we ask him to find amusement at 
our home, as we sometimes do to make up a party 
at cards, with the arriere-pensee of exploiting him to 
our own profit. Do you think it the height of 
pleasure for others to admire us, to admit our 
superiority, and to act as our tools ? Is there any- 
thing in the world so disgusting as to feel one's self 
patronized, made capital of, enrolled in a claque ? 
To give pleasure to others and take it ourselves, we 
have to begin by removing the ego, which is hate- 
ful, and then keep it in chains as long as the diver- 
sions last. There is no worse kill-joy than the ego. 
We must be good children, sweet and kind, button 
our coats over our medals and titles, and with our 
whole heart put ourselves at the disposal of others. 

Let us sometimes live — be it only for an hour, 
and though we must lay all else aside — to make 
others smile. The sacrifice is only in appearance ; 
no one finds more pleasure for himself than he who 
knows how, without ostentation, to give himself 
that he may procure for those around him a moment 
of forgetfulness and happiness. 

When shall we be so simply and truly men as not 
to obtrude our personal business and distresses upon 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 89 

the people we meet socially? May we not forget 
for an hour our pretensions, our strife, our distribu- 
tions into sets and cliques — in short, our " parts," 
and become as children once more, to laugh again 
that good laugh which does so much to make the 
world better ? 



H 



ERE I feel drawn to speak of something 
very particular, and in so doing to offer 
my well-disposed readers an opportunity 
to go about a splendid business. I want to call 
their attention to several classes of people seldom 
thought of with reference to their pleasures. 

It is understood that a broom serves only to 
sweep, a watering-pot to water plants, a coffee-mill 
to grind coffee, and likewise it is supposed that a 
nurse is designed only to care for the sick, a pro- 
fessor to teach, a priest to preach, bury, and confess, 
a sentinel to mount guard; and the conclusion is 
drawn that the people given up to the more serious 
business of life are dedicated to labor, like the ox. 
Amusement is incompatible with their activities. 
Pushing this view still further, we think ourselves 
warranted in believing that the infirm, the afflicted, 
the bankrupt, the vanquished in life's battle, and all 



90 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

those who carry heavy burdens, are in the shade, 
like the northern slopes of mountains, and that it is 
so of necessity. Whence the conclusion that seri- 
ous people have no need of pleasure, and that to 
offer it to them would be unseemly ; while as to the 
afflicted, there would be a lack of delicacy in break- 
ing the thread of their sad meditations. It seems 
therefore to be understood that certain persons are 
condemned to be always serious, that we should 
approach them in a serious frame of mind, and talk 
to them only of serious things : so, too, when we 
visit the sick or unfortunate ; we should leave our 
smiles at the door, compose our face and manner to 
dolefulness, and talk of anything heartrending. 
Thus we carry darkness to those in darkness, 
shade to those in shade. We increase the isola- 
tion of solitary lives and the monotony of the dull 
and sad. We wall up some existences as it were in 
dungeons ; and because the grass grows round their 
deserted prison-house, we speak low in approaching 
it, as though it were a tomb. Who suspects the 
work of infernal cruelty which is thus accomplished 
every day in the world ! This ought not to be. 

When you find men or women whose lives are 
lost in hard tasks, or in the painful office of seeking 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 91 

out human wretchedness and binding up wounds, 
remember that they are beings made like you, that 
they have the same wants, that there are hours 
when they need pleasure and diversion. You will 
not turn them aside from their mission by making 
them laugh occasionally — these people who see so 
many tears and griefs ; on the contrary, you will 
give them strength to go on the better with their 
work. 

And when people whom you know are in trial, do 
not draw a sanitary cordon round them — as though 
they had the plague — that you cross only with 
precautions which recall to them their sad lot. On 
the contrary, after showing all your sympathy, all 
your respect for their grief, comfort them, help them 
to take up life again ; carry them a breath from the 
out-of-doors — something in short to remind them 
that their misfortune does not shut them off from 
the world. 

And so extend your sympathy to those whose 
work quite absorbs them, who are, so to put it, tied 
down. The world is full of men and women sacri- 
ficed to others, who never have either rest or pleas- 
ure, and to whom the least relaxation, the slightest 
respite, is a priceless good. And this minimum of 



92 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

comfort could be so easily found for them if only we 
thought of it. But the broom, you know, is made 
for sweeping, and it seems as though it could not be 
fatigued. Let us rid ourselves of this criminal blind- 
ness which prevents us from seeing the exhaustion 
of those who are always in the breach. Relieve the 
sentinels perishing at their posts, give Sisyphus an 
hour to breathe ; take for a moment the place of 
the mother, a slave to the cares of her house and 
her children ; sacrifice an hour of our sleep for some- 
one worn by long vigils with the sick. Young girl, 
tired sometimes perhaps of your walk with your 
governess, take the cook's apron, and give her the 
key to the fields. You will at once make others 
happy and be happy yourself. We go unconcernedly 
along beside our brothers who are bent under bur- 
dens we might take upon ourselves for a minute. 
And this short respite would suffice to soothe aches, 
revive the flame of joy in many a heart, and open 
up a wide place for brotherliness. How much better 
would one understand another if he knew how to 
put himself heartily in that other's place, and how 
much more pleasure there would be in life I 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 93 

I HAVE spoken too fully elsewhere of systema- 
tizing amusements for the youngs to return to 
it here in detail.* But I wish to say in sub- 
stance what cannot be too often repeated : If you 
wish youth to be moral, do not neglect its pleasures, 
or leave to chance the task of providing them. You 
will perhaps say that young people do not like to 
have their amusements submitted to regulations, 
and that besides, in our day, they are already over- 
spoiled and divert themselves only too much. I 
shall reply, first, that one may suggest ideas, indi- 
cate directions, offer opportunities for amusement, 
without making any regulations whatever. In the 
second place, I shall make you see that you deceive 
yourselves in thinking youth has too much diversion. 
Aside from amusements that are artificial, enervat- 
ing and immoral, that blight life instead of making 
it bloom in splendor, there are very few left to-day. 
Abuse, that enemy of legitimate use, has so befouled 
the world, that it is becoming difficult to touch any- 
thing but what is unclean : whence watchfulness, 
warnings and endless prohibitions. One can hardly 
stir without encountering something that resembles 
unhealthy pleasure. Among young people of to- 

* See " Youth," the chapter on " Joy." 



94 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

day, particularly the self-respecting, the dearth of 
amusements causes real suffering. One is not 
weaned from this generous wine without discomfort. 
Impossible to prolong this state of affairs without 
deepening the shadow round the heads of the 
younger generations. We must come to their aid. 
Our children are heirs of a joyless world. We be- 
queath them cares, hard questions, a life heavy with 
shackles and complexities. Let us at least make an 
effort to brighten the morning of their days. Let us 
interest ourselves in their sports, find them pleasure- 
grounds, open to them our hearts and our homes. 
Let us bring the family into our amusements. Let 
gayety cease to be a commodity of export. Let us 
call in our sons, whom our gloomy interiors send out 
into the street, and our daughters, moping in dismal 
solitude. Let us multiply anniversaries, family par- 
ties, and excursions. Let us raise good humor in 
our homes to the height of an institution. Let the 
schools, too, do their part. Let masters and stu- 
dents — school-boys and college-boys — meet to- 
gether oftener for amusement. It will be so much 
the better for serious work. There is no such aid 
to understanding one's professor as to have laughed in 
his company ; and conversely, to be well understood 



SIMPLE PLEASURES 95 

a pupil must be met elsewhere than in class or ex- 
amination. 

And who will furnish the money ? What a ques- 
tion ! That is exactly the error. Pleasure and 
money; people take them for the two wings of the 
same bird! A gross illusion ! Pleasure, like all 
other truly precious things in this world, cannot be 
bought or sold. If you wish to be amused, you 
must do your part toward it ; that is the essential. 
There is no prohibition against opening your purse, 
if you can do it, and find it desirable. But I assure 
you it is not indispensable. Pleasure and simplicity 
are two old acquaintances. Entertain simply, meet 
your friends simply. If you come from work well 
done, are as amiable and genuine as possible toward 
your companions, and speak no evil of the absent, 
your success is sure. 



VIII 

THE MERCENARY SPIRIT AND SIM- 
PLICITY 

WE have in passing touched upon a 
certain wide-spread prejudice which 
attributes to money a magic power. 
Having come so near enchanted 
ground we will not retire in awe, but plant a firm 
foot here, persuaded of many truths that should be 
spoken. They are not new, but how they are for- 
gotten ! 

I see no possible way of doing without money. 
The only thing that theorists or legislators who 
accuse it of all our ills have hitherto achieved, has 
been to change its name or form. But they have 
never been able to dispense with a symbol repre- 
sentative of the commercial value of things. One 
might as well wish to do away with written lan- 
guage as to do away with money. Nevertheless, 
this question of a circulating medium is very 

troublesome. It forms one of the chief elements of 

96 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 97 

complication in our life. The economic difficulties 
amid which we still flounder, social conventionali- 
ties, and the entire organization of modern life, 
have carried gold to a rank so eminent that it is not 
astonishing to find the imagination of man attribut- 
ing to it a sort of royalty. And it is on this side 
that we shall attack the problem. 

The term money has for appendage that of mer- 
chandise. If there were no merchandise there 
would be no money ; but as long as there is mer- 
chandise there will be money, little matter under 
what form. The source of all the abuses which 
centre around money lies in a lack of discrimination. 
People have confused under the term and idea of 
merchandise, things which have no relation with 
one another. They have attempted to give a venal 
value to things which neither could have it nor 
ought to. The idea of purchase and sale has 
invaded ground where it may justly be considered 
an enemy and a usurper. It is reasonable that 
wheat, potatoes, wine, fabrics, should be bought and 
sold, and it is perfectly natural that a man's labor 
procure him rights to life, and that there be put 
into his hands something whose value represents 
them ; but here already the analogy ceases to be 



98 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

complete. A man's labor is not merchandise in the 
same sense as a sack of flour or a ton of coal. Into 
this labor enter elements which cannot be valued in 
money. In short, there are things which can in no 
Wise be bought : sleep, for instance, knowledge of 
the future, talent. He who offers them for sale 
must be considered a fool or an impostor. And yet 
there are gentlemen who coin money by such 
traffic. They sell what does not belong to them, 
and their dupes pay fictitious values in veritable 
coin. So, too, there are dealers in pleasure, dealers 
in love, dealers in miracles, dealers in patriotism, 
and the title of merchant, so honorable when it 
represents a man selling that which is in truth a 
commodity of trade, becomes the worst of stigmas 
when there is question of tile heart, of religion, of 
country. 

Almost all men are agreed that to barter with 
one's sentiments, his honor, his cloth, his pen, or 
his note, is infamous. Unfortunately this idea, which 
suffers no contradiction as a theory, and which thus 
stated seems rather a commonplace than a high 
moral truth, has infinite trouble to make its way in 
practice. Traffic has invaded the world. The 
money-changers are established even in the sanctu- 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 99 

ary, and by sanctuary 1 do not mean religious things 
alone, but whatever mankind holds sacred and in- 
violable. It is not gold that complicates, corrupts, 
and debases life ; it is our mercenary spirit. 

The mercenary spirit resolves everything into a 
single question : How much is that going to bring 
me ? and sums up everything in a single axiom : 
With money you can procure anything. Following 
these two principles of conduct, a society may 
descend to a degree of infamy impossible to describe 
or to imagine. 

How much is it going to bring me ? This question, 
so legitimate while it concerns those precautions 
which each ought to take to assure his subsistence 
by his labor, becomes pernicious as soon as it passes 
its limits and dominates the whole life. This is so 
true that it vitiates even the toil which gains our 
daily bread. I furnish paid labor ; nothing could 
be better : but if to inspire me in this labor I have 
only the desire to get the pay, nothing could be 
worse. A man whose only motive for action is his 
wages, does a bad piece of work : what interests 
him is not the doing, it's the gold. If he can 
retrench in pains without lessening his gains, be 
assured that he will do it. Plowman, mason, factory 



100 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

laborer, he who loves not his work puts into it 
neither interest nor dignity — is, in short, a bad 
workman. It is not well to confide one's life to a 
doctor who is wholly engrossed in his fees, for the 
spring of his action is the desire to garnish his purse 
with the contents of yours. If it is for his interest 
that you should suffer longer, he is capable of fos- 
tering your malady instead of fortifying your 
strength. The instructor of children who cares for 
his work only so far as it brings him profit, is a sad 
teacher ; for his pay is indifferent, and his teaching 
more indifferent still. Of what value is the mer- 
cenary journalist ? The day you write for the 
dollar, your prose is not worth the dollar you write 
for. The more elevated in kind is the object of 
human labor, the more the mercenary spirit, if it be 
present, makes this labor void and corrupts it. 
There are a thousand reasons to say that all toil 
merits its wage, that every man who devotes his 
energies to providing for his life should have his 
place in the sun, and that he who does nothing 
useful, does not gain his livelihood, in short, is only 
a parasite. But there is no greater social error 
than to make gain the sole motive of action. The 
best we put into our work — be that work done by 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 101 

strength of muscle, warmth of heart, or concentra- 
tion of mind — is precisely that for which no one 
can pay us. Nothing better proves that man is not 
a machine than this fact : two men at work with 
the same forces and the same movements, produce 
totally different results. Where lies the cause of 
this phenomenon ? In the divergence of their 
intentions. One has the mercenary spirit, the 
other has singleness of purpose. Both receive 
their pay, but the labor of the one is barren ; the 
other has put his soul into his work. The work of 
the first is like a grain of sand, out of which nothing 
comes through all eternity ; the other's work is like 
the living seed thrown into the ground ; it germi- 
nates and brings forth harvests. This is the secret 
which explains why so many people have failed 
while employing the very processes by which others 
succeed. Automatons do not reproduce their kind, 
and mercenary labor yields no fruit. 

UNQUESTIONABLY we must bow before 
economic facts, and recognize the diffi- 
culties of living : from day to day it be- 
comes more imperative to combine well one's forces 
in order to succeed in feeding, clothing, housing, 



102 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

and bringing up a family. He who does not rightly 
take account of these crying necessities, who makes 
no calculation, no provision for the future, is but a 
visionary or an incompetent, and runs the risk of 
sooner or later asking alms from those at whose 
parsimony he has sneered. And yet, what would 
become of us if these cares absorbed us entirely ? 
if, mere accountants, we should wish to measure 
our effort by the money it brings, do nothing that 
does not end in a receipt, and consider as things 
worthless or pains lost whatever cannot be drawn 
up in figures on the pages of a ledger ? Did our 
mothers look for pay in loving us and caring for us ? 
What would become of filial piety if we asked it 
for loving and caring for our aged parents ? 

What does it cost you to speak the truth ? Mis^ 
understandings, sometimes sufferings and persecu- 
tions. To defend your country ? Weariness, wounds 
and often death. To do good ? Annoyance, in- 
gratitude, even resentment. Self-sacrifice enters 
into all the essential actions of humanity. I defy 
the closest calculators to maintain their position in 
the world without ever appealing to aught but their 
calculations. True, those who know how to make 
their "pile" are rated as men of ability. But 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 108 

look a little closer. How much of it do they owe to 
the unselfishness of the simple-hearted ? Would 
they have succeeded had they met only shrewd men 
of their own sort, having for device : " No money 
no service ?" Let us be outspoken; it is due to 
certain people who do not count too rigorously, that 
the world gets on. The most beautiful acts of ser- 
vice and the hardest tasks have generally little re- 
muneration or none. Fortunately there are always 
men ready for unselfish deeds ; and even for those 
paid only in suffering, though they cost gold, peace, 
and even life. The part these men play is often 
painful and discouraging. Who of us has not heard 
recitals of experiences wherein the narrator regretted 
some past kindness he had done, some trouble he 
had taken, to have nothing but vexation in return ? 
These confidences generally end thus: "It was folly 
to do the thing ! " Sometimes it is right so to 
judge; for it is always a mistake to cast pearls before 
swine ; but how many lives there are whose sole acts 
of real beauty are these very ones of which the doers 
repent because of men's ingratitude ! Our wish foi 
humanity is that the number of these foolish deeds 
may go on increasing. 



104 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

AND now I arrive at the credo of the mer- 
cenary spirit. It is characterized by brev- 
ity. For the mercenary man, the law and 
the prophets are contained in this one axiom : With 
money you can get anything. From a surface view of 
our social life, nothing seems more evident. " The 
sinews of war/' "the shining mark/' "the key that 
opens all doors/' "king money!" — If one gathered 
up all the sayings about the glory and power of gold, 
he could make a litany longer than that which is 
chanted in honor of the Virgin. You must be with- 
out a penny, if only for a day or two, and try to live 
in this world of ours, to have any idea of the needs 
of him whose purse is empty. I invite those who 
love contrasts and unforeseen situations, to attempt 
to live without money three days, and far from 
their friends and acquaintances — in short, far from 
the society in which they are somebody. They will 
gain more experience in forty-eight hours than in 
a year otherwise. Alas for some people ! they have 
this experience thrust upon them, and when verita- 
ble ruin descends around their heads, it is useless to 
remain in their own country, among the companions 
of their youth, their former colleagues, even those 
indebted to them. People affect to know them no 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 105 

longer. With what bitterness do they comment on 
the creed of money : — With gold one may have 
what he will ; without it, impossible to have any- 
thing ! They become pariahs, lepers, whom every- 
one shuns. Flies swarm round cadavers, men round 
gold. Take away the gold, nobody is there. Oh, it 
has caused tears to flow, this creed of gain ! bitter 
tears, tears of blood, even from those very eyes 
which once adored the golden calf. 

And with it all, this creed is false, quite false. I 
shall not advance to the attack with hackneyed 
tales of the rich man astray in a desert, who cannot 
get even a drop of water for his gold ; or the 
decrepit millionaire who would give half he has to 
buy from a stalwart fellow without a cent, his 
twenty years and his lusty health. No more shall I 
attempt to prove that one cannot buy happiness. 
So many people who have money and so many more 
who have not would smile at this truth as the hard- 
est ridden of saws. But I shall appeal to the com- 
mon experience of each of you, to make you put 
your finger on the clumsy lie hidden beneath an 
axiom that all the world goes about repeating. 

Fill your purse to the best of your means, and let 
us set out for one of the watering-places of which 



106 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

there are so many. I mean some little town for- 
merly unknown and full of simple folk, respectful 
and hospitable, among whom it was good to be, and 
cost little. Fame with her hundred trumpets has 
announced them to the world, and shown them how 
they can profit from their situation, their climate, 
their personality. You start out, on the faith of 
Dame Rumor, flattering yourself that with your 
money you are going to find a quiet place to rest, 
and, far from the world of civilization and conven- 
tion, weave a bit of poetry into the warp of your 
days. 

The beginning is good. Nature's setting and 
some patriarchal costumes, slow to disappear, de- 
light you. But as time passes, the impression 
is spoiled. The reverse side of things begins to 
show. This which you thought was as true antique 
as family heirlooms, is naught but trickery to 
mystify the credulous. Everything is labeled, all is 
for sale, from the earth to the inhabitants. These 
primitives have become the most consummate of 
sharpers. Given your money, they have resolved 
the problem of getting it with the least expense to 
themselves. On all sides are nets and traps, like 
spider-webs, and the fly that this gentry lies snugly 



THE MERCExNARY SPIRIT 107 

in wait for is you. This is what twenty or thirty 
years of venality has done for a population once 
simple and honest, whose contact was grateful 
indeed to men worn by city life. Home-made 
bread has disappeared, butter comes from the 
dealer, they know to an art how to skim milk and 
adulterate wine ; they have all the vices of dwellers 
in cities without their virtues. 

As you leave, you count your money. So much 
is wanting, that you make complaint. You are 
wrong. One never pays too dear for the conviction 
that there are things which money will not buy. 

You have need in your house of an intelligent 
and competent servant : attempt to find this rara 
avis. According to the principle that with money 
one may get anything, you ought, as the position 
you offer is inferior, ordinary, good, or exceptional, 
to find servants unskilled, average, excellent, supe- 
rior. But all those who present themselves for the 
vacant post are listed in the last category, and are 
fortified with certificates to support their preten- 
sions. It is true that nine times out of ten, when 
put to the test, these experts are found totally 
wanting. Then why did they engage themselves 
with you ? They ought in truth to reply as does 



108 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

the cook in the comedy, who is dearly paid and 
proves to know nothing. 

" Why did you hire out as a cordon bleu ? 
It was to get bigger commissions." 

That is the great affair. You will always find 
people who like to get big wages. More rarely you 
find capability. And if you are looking for probity, 
the difficulty increases. Mercenaries may be had for 
the asking ; faithfulness is another thing. Far be 
it from me to deny the existence of faithful ser- 
vants, at once intelligent and upright. But you 
will encounter as many, if not more, among the illy 
paid as among those most highly salaried. And it 
little matters where you find them, you may be sure 
that they are not faithful in their own interest ; they 
are faithful because they have somewhat of that 
simplicity which renders us capable of self-abnega- 
tion. 

We also hear on all sides the adage that money 
is the sinews of war. There is no question but that 
war costs much money, and we know something 
about it. Does this mean that in order to defend 
herself against her enemies and to honor her flag, a 
country need only be rich ? In olden time the 



THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 109 

Greeks took it upon themselves to teach the Per- 
sians the contrary, and this lesson will never cease 
to be repeated in history. With money ships, 
cannon, horses may be bought ; but not so military 
genius, administrative wisdom, discipline, enthusi- 
asm. Put millions into the hands of your recruiters, 
and charge them to bring you a great leader and an 
army. You will find a hundred captains instead of 
one, and a thousand soldiers. But put them under 
fire: you will have enough of your hirelings ! At least 
one might imagine that with money alone it is pos- 
sible to lighten misery. Ah ! that too is an illusion 
from which we must turn away. Money, be the 
sum great or small, is a seed which germinates into 
abuses. Unless there go with it intelligence, kind- 
ness, much knowledge of men, it will do nothing 
but harm, and we run great risk of corrupting both 
those who receive our bounty and those charged 
with its distribution. 

MONEY will not answer for everything : 
it is a power, but it is not all-powerful. 
Nothing complicates life, demoralizes 
man, perverts the normal course of society like the 
development of venality. Wherever it reigns, 



110 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

everybody is duped by everybody else : one can no 
longer put trust in persons or things, no longer 
obtain anything of value. We would not be detrac- 
tors of money, but this general law must be applied 
to it : Everything in its own place. When gold, 
which should be a servant, becomes a tyrannical 
power, affronting morality, dignity and liberty ; when 
some exert themselves to obtain it at any price, 
offering for sale what is not merchandise, and 
others, possessing wealth, fancy that they can pur- 
chase what no one may buy, it is time to rise against 
this gross and criminal superstition, and cry aloud to 
the imposture : " Thy money perish with thee f M 
The most precious things that man possesses he has 
almost always received gratuitously : let him learn 
so to give them* 



IX 



NOTORIETY AND THE INGLORIOUS 
GOOD 

ONE of the chief puerilities of our time is 
the love of advertisement. To emerge 
from obscurity, to be in the public eye, 
to make one's self talked of — some 
people are so consumed with this desire that we are 
justified in declaring them attacked with an itch for 
publicity. In their eyes obscurity is the height of 
ignominy : so they do their best to keep their names 
in every mouth. In their obscure position they 
look upon themselves as lost, like ship-wrecked 
sailors whom a night of tempest has cast on some 
lonely rock, and who have recourse to cries, volleys, 
fire, all the signals imaginable, to let it be known 
that they are there. Not content with setting off 
crackers and innocent rockets, many, to make them- 
selves heard at any cost, have gone to the length of 
perfidy and even crime. The incendiary Erostratus 

has made numerous disciples. How many men o/ 

111 



112 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

to-day have become notorious for having destroyed 
something of mark ; pulled down — or tried to pull 
down — some man's high reputation ; signalled their 
passage, in short, by a scandal, a meanness, or an 
atrocity ! 

This rage for notoriety does not surge through 
cracked brains alone, or only in the world of advent- 
urers, charlatans and pretenders generally ; it has 
spread abroad in all the domains of life, spiritual 
and material. Politics, literature, even science, and 
— most odious of all — philanthropy and religion 
are infected. Trumpets announce a good deed 
done, and souls must be saved with din and clamor. 
Pursuing its way of destruction, the rage for noise 
has entered places ordinarily silent, troubled spirits 
naturally serene, and vitiated in large measure all 
activity for good. The abuse of showing everything, 
or rather, putting everything on exhibition ; the 
growing incapacity to appreciate that which chooses 
to remain hidden, and the habit of estimating the 
value of things by the racket they make, have come 
to corrupt the judgment of the most earnest men, 
and one sometimes wonders if societv will not end 
by transforming itself into a great fair, with each one 
beating his drum in front of his tent. 



NOTORIETY 113 

Gladly do we quit the dust and din of like 
exhibitions, to go and breathe peacefully in some 
far-off nook of the woods, all surprise that the brook 
is so limpid, the forest so still, the solitude so 
enchanting. Thank God there are yet these unin- 
vaded corners. However formidable the uproar, 
however deafening the babel of merry-andrews, it 
cannot carry beyond a certain limit ; it grows faint 
and dies away. The realm of silence is vaster than 
the realm of noise. Herein is our consolation. 

REST a moment on the threshold of this 
infinite world of inglorious good, of quiet 
activities. Instantly we are under the 
charm we feel in stretches of untrodden snow, in 
hiding wood-flowers, in disappearing pathways that 
seem to lead to horizons without bourn. The world 
is so made that the engines of labor, the most 
active agencies, are everywhere concealed. Nature 
affects a sort of coquetry in masking her operations. 
It costs you pains to spy her out, ingenuity to sur- 
prise her, if you would see anything but results and 
penetrate the secrets of her laboratories. Likewise 
in human society, the forces which move for good 
remain invisible, and even, in our individual lives : 



114 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

what is best in us is incommunicable, buried in the 
depths of us. And the more vital are these sensibil- 
ities and intuitions, confounding themselves with 
the very source of our being, the less ostentatious 
they are : they think themselves profaned by 
exposure to the light of day. There is a secret 
and inexpressible joy in possessing at the heart of 
one's being, an interior world known only to God, 
whence, nevertheless, come impulses, enthusiasms, 
the daily renewal of courage, and the most powerful 
motives for activity among our fellow men. When 
this intimate life loses in intensity, when man 
neglects it for what is superficial, he forfeits in 
worth all that he gains in appearance. By a sad 
fatality, it happens that in this way we often 
become less admirable in proportion as we are 
more admired. And we remain convinced that 
what is best in the world is unknown there ; for 
only those know it who possess it, and if they speak 
of it, in so doing they destroy its charm. 

There are passionate lovers of nature whom she 
fascinates most in by-places, in the cool of forests, 
in the clefts of canons, everywhere that the careless 
lover is not admitted to her contemplation. For- 
getting time and the life of the world, they pass 



NOTORIETY 115 

days in these inviolate stillnesses, watching a bird 
build its nest or brood over its young, or some little 
groundling at its gracious play So to seek the good 
within himself — one must go where he no longer 
finds constraint, or pose, or "gallery" of any sort, 
but the simple fact of a life made up of wishing to 
be what it is good for it to be, without troubling 
about anything else : 

May we be permitted to record here some obser* 
vations made from life ? As no names are given, 
they cannot be considered indiscreet. 

In my country of jUsace, on the solitary route 
whose interminable ribbon stretches on and on 
under the forests of the Vosges, there is a stone- 
breaker whom I have seen at his work for thirty 
years. The first time I came upon him, I was a 
young student, setting out with swelling heart for 
the great city. The sight of this man did me 
good, for he was humming a song as he broke his 
stones, We exchanged a few words, and he said at 
the end : ts Well, good-by, my boy, good courage 
and good luck ! " Since then I have passed and 
repassed along that same route, under circumstances 
the most diverse, painful and joyful The student 
has finished his course, the breaker of stones 



116 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

remains what he was. He has taken a few more 
precautions against the seasons' storms : a rush-mat 
protects his back, and his felt hat is drawn further 
down to shield his face. But the forest is always 
sending back the echo of his valiant hammer. 
How many sudden tempests have broken over his 
bent back, how much adverse fate has fallen on his 
head, on his house, on his country ' He continues 
to break his stones, and, coming and going I find 
him by the roadside, smiling in spite of his age and 
his wrinkles, benevolent, speaking — above all in 
dark days — those simple words of brave men, which 
have so much effect when they are scanned to the 
breaking of stones. 

It would be quite impossible to express the emo 
tion the sight of this simple man gives me, and 
certainly he has no suspicion of it. I know of 
nothing more reassuring and at the same time more 
searching for the vanity which ferments in our 
hearts, than this coming face to face with an 
obscure worker who does his task as the oak grows 
and as the good God makes his sun to rise, without 
asking who is looking on. 

I have known, too, a number of old teachers, men 
and women who have passed their whole life at the 



NOTORIETY lit 

name occupation — making the rudiments of human 
knowledge and a few principles of conduct pene- 
trate heads sometimes harder than the rocks They 
have done it with their whole soul, throughout the 
length of a hard life in which the attention of men 
had little place. When they lie in their unknown 
graves, no one remembers them but a few humble 
people like themselves But their recompense is in 
their love. No one is greater than these unknown, 
How many hidden virtues may one not discover — 
if he know how to search — among people of a class 
he often ridicules without perceiving that in so doing 
he is guilty of cruelty, ingratitude and stupidity ; I 
mean old maids. People amuse themselves with 
remarking the surprising dress and ways of some of 
them — things of no consequence, for that matter. 
They persist also in reminding us that others, very 
selfish, take interest in nothing but their own com- 
fort and that of some cat or canary upon which 
their powers of affection center ; and certainly these 
are not outdone in egoism by the most hardened 
celibates of the stronger sex. But what we oftenest 
forget is the amount of self-sacrifice hidden mod- 
estly away in so many of these truly admirable lives, 
Is it nothing to be without home and its love, Math- 



118 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

out future, without personal ambition ? to take upon 
one's self that cross of solitary life, so hard to bear, 
especially when there is added the solitude of the 
heart? to forget one's self and have no other interests 
than the care of the old, of orphans, the poor, the 
infirm — those whom the brutal mechanism of life 
casts out among its waste ? Seen from without, these 
apparently tame and lusterless lives rouse pity rather 
than envy. Those who approach gently sometimes 
divine sad secrets, great trials undergone, heavy 
burdens beneath which too fragile shoulders bend ; 
but this is only the side of shadow. We should learn 
to know and value this richness of heart, this pure 
goodness, this power to love, to console, to hope, this 
joyful giving up of self, this persistence in sweetness 
and forgiveness even toward the unworthy. Poor 
old maids ! how many wrecked lives have you 
rescued, how many wounded have you healed, how 
many wanderers have you gently led aright, how 
many naked have you clothed, how many orphans 
have you taken in, and how many strangers, who 
would have been alone in the world but for you — 
you who yourselves are often remembered of no 
one. I mistake. Someone knows you ; it is that 
great mysterious Pity which keeps watch over our 



NOTORIETY 119 

lives and suffers in our misfortunes. Forgotten like 
you, often blasphemed, it has confided to you some 
of its heavenliest messages, and that perhaps is why 
above your gentle comings and goings, we some- 
times seem to hear the rustling wings of ministering 
angels. 



i 



"^HE good hides itself under so many differ- 
ent forms, that one has often as much 
pains to discover it as to unearth the best 
concealed crimes. A Russian doctor, who had 
passed ten years of his life in Siberia, condemned for 
political reasons to forced labor, used to find great 
pleasure in telling of the generosity, courage and 
humanity he had observed, not only among a large 
number of the condemned, but also among the 
convict guards. For the moment one is tempted to 
exclaim: Where will not the good hide away.' 
And in truth life offers here great surprises and 
embarrassing contrasts. There are good men, 
officially so recognized, quoted among their associ- 
ates, I had almost said guaranteed by the Govern- 
ment or the Church, who can be reproached with 
nothing but dry and hard hearts ; while we are 
astonished to encounter in certain fallen human 



120 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

beings, the most genuine tenderness, and as it were 
a thirst for self-devotion. 

I SHOULD like to speak next — apropos of the 
inglorious good — of a class that to-day it is 
thought quite fitting to treat with the utmost 
one-sidedness. I mean the rich. Some people 
think the last word is said when they have stigma- 
tized that infamy, capital. For them, all who pos- 
sess great fortunes are monsters gorged with the 
blood of the miserable. Others, not so declama- 
tory, persist, however, in confounding riches with 
egoism and insensibility. Justice should be visited 
on these errors, be they involuntary or calculated. 
No doubt there are rich men who concern them- 
selves with nobody else, and others who do good 
only with ostentation ; indeed, we know it too well. 
But does their inhumanity or hypocrisy take away 
the value of the good that others do, and that they 
often hide with a modesty so perfect ? 

I knew a man to whom every misfortune had 
come which can strike us in our affections. He had 
lost a beloved wife, had seen all his children buried, 
one after another. But he had a great fortune, the 
result of his own labor. Living in the utmost sim« 



NOTORIETY 1S1 

plicity, almost without personal wants, he spent his 
time in searching for opportunities to do good, and 
profiting by them. How many people he surprised 
in flagrant poverty, what means he combined for re- 
lieving distress and lighting up dark lives, with what 
kindly thoughtfulness he took his friends unawares, 
no one can imagine. He liked to do good to others 
and enjoy their surprise when they did not know 
whence the relief came. It pleased him to repair 
the injustices of fortune, to bring tears of happiness 
in families pursued by mischance. He was contin- 
ually plotting, contriving, machinating in the dark, 
with a childish fear of being caught with his hand 
in the bag. The greater part of these fine deeds 
were not known till after his death ; the whole of 
them we shall never know. 

He was a socialist of the right sort! for there 
are two kinds of them. Those who aspire to appro- 
priate to themselves a part of the goods of others, 
are numerous and commonplace. To belong to 
their order it suffices to have a big appetite. 
Those who are hungering to divide their own goods 
with men who have none, are rare and precious, for 
to enter this choice company there is need of a 
brave and noble heart, free from selfishness, and 



122 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

sensitive to both the happiness and unhappiness of 
its fellows. Fortunately the race of these socialists 
is not extinct, and I feel an unalloyed satisfaction in 
offering them a tribute they never claim. 

I must be pardoned for dwelling upon this. It 
does one good to offset the bitterness of so many in- 
famies, so many calumnies, so much charlatanism, by 
resting the eyes upon something more beautiful, 
breathing the perfume of these stray corners where 
simple goodness flowers. 

A lady, a foreigner, doubtless little used to Paris- 
ian life, just now told me with what horror the 
things she sees here inspire her: — -these vile post- 
ers, these "yellow" journals, these women with 
bleached hair, this crowd rushing to the races, to 
dance-halls, to roulette tables, to corruption — the 
whole flood of superficial and mundane life. She 
did not speak the word Babylon, but doubtless it 
was out of pity for one of the inhabitants of tbis 
city of perdition. 

" Alas, yes, madam, these things are sad, but you 
have not seen all." 

" Heaven preserve me from that ! " 

"On the contrary, I wish you could see every- 
thing ; for if the dark side is very ugly, there is so 



NOTORIETY 123 

much to atone for it. And believe me, madam, you 
have simply to change your quarter, or observe at 
another hour. For instance, take the Paris of early 
morning. It will offer much to correct your impres- 
sions of the Paris of the night. Go see, among so 
many other working people, the street-sweepers, 
who come out at the hour when the revellers and 
malefactors go in. Observe beneath these rags 
those caryatid bodies, those austere faces ! How 
serious they are at their work of sweeping away 
the refuse of the night's revelry. One might liken 
them to the prophets at Ahasuerus's gates. There 
are women among them, many old people. When 
the air is cold they stop to blow their fingers, and 
then go at it again. So it is every day. And they, 
too, are inhabitants of Paris. 

Go next to the faubourgs, to the factories, espe- 
cially the smaller ones, where the children or the 
employers labor with the men. Watch the army 
of workers marching to their tasks. How ready and 
willing these young girls seem, as they come gaily 
down from their distant quarters to the shops and 
stores and offices of the city. Then visit the homes 
from which they come. See the woman of the peo- 
ple at her work. Her husband's wages are modest, 



124 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

their dwelling is cramped, the children are many, 
the father is often harsh. Make a collection of the 
biographies of lowly people, budgets of modest fam- 
ily life : look at them attentively and long. 

After that, go see the students. Those who have 
scandalized you in the streets are numerous, but 
those who labor hard are legion — only they stay at 
home, and are not talked about. If you knew the 
toil and dig of the Latin Quarter! You find the 
papers full of the rumpus made by a certain set of 
youths who call themselves students. The papers 
say enough of those who break windows ; but why 
do they make no mention of those who spend their 
nights toiling over problems? Because it wouldn't 
interest the public. Yes, when now and then one 
of them, a medical student perhaps, dies a victim to 
professional duty, the matter has two lines in the 
dailies. A drunken brawl gets half a column, with 
every detail elaborated. Nothing is lacking but the 
portraits of the heroes — and not always that J 

I should never end were I to try to point out to 
you all that you must go to see il you would see 
all: you would needs make the tour of society at 
large, rich and poor, wise and ignorant. And cer- 
tainly you would not judge so severely then. Paris 



NOTORIETY 125 

is a world, and here, as in the world in general, the 
good hides away while the evil flaunts itself. Ob- 
serving only the surface, you sometimes ask how 
there can possibly be so much riff-raff. When, on 
the contrary, you look into the depths, you are 
astonished that in this troublous, obscure and some- 
times frightful life there can be so much of virtue. 

BUT why linger over these things ? Am I 
not blowing trumpets for those who hold 
trumpet-blowing in horror ? Do not un- 
derstand me so. My aim is this — to make men 
think about unostentatious goodness ; above all, to 
make them love it and practice it. The man who 
finds his satisfaction in things which glitter and 
hold his eyes, is lost : first, because he will thus 
see evil before all else ; then, because he gets ac- 
customed to the sight of only such good as seeks 
for notice, and therefore easily succumbs to the 
temptation to live himself for appearances. Not 
only must one be resigned to obscurity, he must 
love it, if he does not wish to slip insensibly into 
the ranks of figurants, who preserve their parts only 
while under the eyes of the spectators, and put off 
in the wings the restraints imposed on the stage. 



126 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

Here we are in the presence of one of the essential 
elements of the moral life. And this which we say 
is true not only for those who are called humble 
and whose lot it is to pass unremarked ; it is just as 
true, and more so, for the chief actors. If you 
would not be a brilliant inutility, a man of gold lace 
and plumes, but empty inside, you must play the 
star role in the simple spirit of the most obscure of 
your collaborators. He who is nothing worth except 
on hours of parade, is worth less than nothing. 
Have we the perilous honor of being always in 
view, of marching in the front ranks ? Let us take 
so much the greater care of the sanctuary of silent 
good within us. Let us give to the structure whose 
facade is seen of our fellowmen, a wide foundation 
of simplicity, of humble fidelity. And then, out 
of sympathy, out of gratitude, let us stay near our 
brothers who are unknown to fame. We owe 
everything to them — do we not ? I call to wit- 
ness everyone who has found in life this encour- 
aging experience, that stones hidden in the soil hold 
up the whole edifice. All those who arrive at hav- 
ing a public and recognized value, owe it to some 
humble spiritual ancestors, to some forgotten inspir- 
ers. A small number of the good, among them 



NOTORIETY 127 

simple women, peasants, vanquished heroes, parents 
as modest as they are revered, personify for us 
beautiful and noble living ; their example inspires 
us and gives us strength. The remembrance of 
them is forever inseparable from that conscience 
before which we arraign ourselves. In our hours 
of trial, we think of them, courageous and serene, 
and our burdens lighten. In clouds they compass 
us about, these witnesses invisible and beloved who 
keep us from stumbling and our feet from falling 
in the battle ; and day by day do they prove to us 
that the treasure of humanity is its hidden goodness. 



THE WORLD AND THE LIFE OF THE 
HOME 

IN the time of the Second Empire, in one of oui 
pleasantest sub-prefectures of the provinces, 
a little way from some baths frequented by 
the Emperor, there was a mayor, a very 
worthy man and intelligent too, whose head was 
suddenly turned by the thought that his sovereign 
might one day descend upon his home. Up to this 
time he had lived in the house of his fathers, a son 
respectful of the slightest family traditions. But 
when once the all-absorbing idea of receiving the 
Emperor had taken possession of his brain, he be- 
came another man. In this new light, what had 
before seemed sufficient for his needs, even enjoy- 
able, all this simplicity that his ancestors had loved, 
appeared poor, ugly, ridiculous. Out of the ques- 
tion to ask an Emperor to climb this wooden stair^ 
case, sit in these old arm-chairs, walk over such su- 
perannuated carpets. So the mayor called architect 

US 



THE LIFE OF THE HOME 129 

and masons ; pickaxes attacked walls and demolished 
partitions, and a drawing-room was made, out of all 
proportion to the rest of the house in size and 
splendor. He and his family retired into close 
quarters, where people and furniture incommoded 
each other generally. Then, having emptied his 
purse and upset his household by this stroke of ge- 
nius, he awaited the royal guest. Alas, he soon saw 
the end of the Empire arrive, but the Emperor 
never. 

The folly of this poor man is not so rare. As 
mad as he are all those who sacrifice their home 
life to the demands of the world. And the danger 
in such a sacrifice is most menacing in times of un- 
rest. Our contemporaries are constantly exposed to 
it, and constantly succumbing. How many family 
treasures have they literally thrown away to satisfy 
worldly ambitions and conventions ; but the hap- 
piness upon which they thought to come through 
these impious immolations always eludes them. 

To give up the ancestral hearth, to let the family 
traditions fall into desuetude, to abandon the simple 
domestic customs, for whatever return, is to make a 
fool's bargain ; and such is the place in society of 
family life, that if this be impoverished, the trouble 



130 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

is felt throughout the whole social organism. To 
enjoy a normal development, this organism has need 
of well-tried individuals, each having his own value, 
his own hall-mark. Otherwise society becomes a 
flock, and sometimes a flock without a shepherd. 
But whence does the individual draw his originality 
— this unique something, which, joined to the dis- 
tinctive qualities of others, constitutes the wealth 
and strength of a community ? He can draw it only 
from his own family. Destroy the assemblage of 
memories and practices whence emanates for each 
home an atmosphere in miniature, and you dry up 
the sources of character, sap the strength of public 
spirit. 

It concerns the country that each home be a 
world, profound, respected, communicating to its 
members an ineffaceable moral imprint. But before 
pursuing the subject further, let us rid ourselves of a 
misunderstanding. Family feeling, like all beautiful 
things, has its caricature, which is family egoism. 
Some families are like barred and bolted citadels, 
their members organized for the exploitation of the 
whole world. Everything that does not directly 
concern them is indifferent to them. They live like 
colonists, I had almost said intruders, in the society 



THE LIFE OF THE HOME 131 

around them. Their particularism is pushed to such 
an excess that they make enemies of the whole hu* 
man race. In their small way they resemble those 
powerful societies, formed from time to time through 
the ages, which possess themselves of universal rule, 
and for which no one outside their own community 
counts. This is the spirit that has sometimes made 
the family seem a retreat of egoism which it was 
necessary to destroy for the public safety. But as 
patriotism and jingoism are as far apart as the east 
from the west, so are family feeling and clannish- 
ness. 

ERE we are talking of right family feeling, 
and nothing else in the world can take its 
place ; for in it lie in germ all those fine 
and simple virtues which assure the strength and 
duration of social institutions. And the very base of 
family feeling is respect for the past ; for the best 
possessions of a family are its common memories. 
An intangible, indivisible and inalienable capital, 
these souvenirs constitute a sacred fund that each 
member of a family ought to consider more precious 
than anything else he possesses. They exist in a 
dual form : in idea and in fact. They show them- 




132 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

selves in language, habits of thought, sentiments, 
even instincts, and one sees them materialized in 
portraits, furniture, buildings, dress, songs. To pro- 
fane eyes, they are nothing ; to the eyes of those 
who know how to appreciate the things of the fam- 
ily, they are relics with which one should not part 
at any price. 

But what generally happens in our day ? World- 
liness wars upon the sentiment of family, and I 
know of no strife more impassioned. By great 
means and small, by all sorts of new customs, require- 
ments and pretensions, the spirit of the world 
breaks into the domestic sanctuary. What are this 
stranger's rights? its titles? Upon what does it 
rest its peremptory claims ? This is what people 
too often neglect to inquire. They make a mis- 
take. We treat the invader as very poor and simple 
people do a pompous visitor. For this incommod- 
ing guest of a day, they pillage their garden, bully 
their children and servants, and neglect their 
work. Such conduct is not only wrong, it is im- 
politic. One should have the courage to remain 
what he is, in the face of all comers. 

The worldly spirit is full of impertinences. Here 
is a home which has formed characters of mark, and 



THE LIFE OF THE HOME 133 

is forming them yet. The people, the furnishings, 
the customs are all in harmony. By marriage or 
through relations of business or pleasure, the 
worldly spirit enters. It finds everything out of 
date, awkward, too simple, lacking the modern 
touch. At first it restricts itself to criticism and 
light raillery. But this is the dangerous moment. 
Look out for yourself; here is the enemy! If you 
so much as listen to his reasonings, to-morrow you 
will sacrifice a piece of furniture, the next day a 
good old tradition, and so one by one the family 
heirlooms dear to the heart will go to the bric-a-brac 
dealer — and filial piety with them. 

In the midst of your new habits and in the 
changed atmosphere, your friends of other days, 
your old relatives, will be expatriated. Your next 
step will be to lay them aside in their turn; the 
worldly spirit leaves the old out of consideration. 
At last, established in an absolutely transformed 
setting, even you will view yourself with amaze- 
ment. Nothing will be familiar, but surely it will 
be correct ; at least the world will be satisfied ! — 
Ah ! that is where you are mistaken ! After having 
made you cast out pure treasure as so much junk, it 
will find that your borrowed livery fits you ill, and 



134 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

will hasten to make you sensible of the ridiculous- 
ness of the situation. Much better have had from 
the beginning the courage of your convictions, and 
have defended your home. 

Many young people when they marry, listen to 
this voice of the w r orld. Their parents have given 
them the example of a modest life; but the new 
generation thinks it affirms its rights to existence 
and liberty, by repudiating ways in its eyes too 
patriarchal. So these young folks make efforts to 
set themselves up lavishly in the latest fashion, and 
rid themselves of useless property at dirt-cheap 
prices. Instead of filling their houses with objects 
which say : Remember ! they garnish them with 
quite new furnishings that as yet have no meaning. 
Wait, I am wrong ; these things are often symbols, 
as it were, of a facile and superficial existence. In 
their midst one breathes a certain heady vapor of 
mundanity. They recall the life outside, the tur- 
moil, the rush. And were one sometimes disposed 
to forget this life, they would call back his wandering 
thought and say : Remember ! — in another sense : 
Do not forget your appointment at the club, the 
play, the races ! The home, then, becomes a sort of 
half-way house where one comes to rest a little 



THE LIFE OF THE HOME 135 

between two prolonged absences ; it isn't a good 
place to stay. As it has no soul, it does not 
speak to yours. Time to eat and sleep, and then 
off again ! Otherwise you become as dull as a 
hermit. 

We are all acquainted with people who have a 
rage for being abroad, who think the world would 
no longer go round if they didn't figure on all sides 
of it. To stay at home is penal ; there they cease 
to be in view. A horror of home life possesses 
them to such a degree that they would rather pay 
to be bored outside than be amused gratuitously 
within. 

In this way society slowly gravitates toward life 
in herds, which must not be confounded with public 
life. The life in herds is somewhat like that of 
swarms of flies in the sun. Nothing so much resem- 
bles the worldly life of a man as the worldly life of 
another man. And this universal banality destroys 
the very essence of public spirit. One need not 
journey far to discover the ravages made in modern 
society by the spirit of worldliness ; and if we have 
so little foundation, so little equilibrium, calm good 
sense and initiative, one of the chief reasons lies in 
the undermining of the home life. The masses 



136 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

have timed their pace by that of people of fashion. 
They too have become worldly. Nothing can be more 
so than to quit one's own hearth for the life of saloons. 
The squalor and misery of the homes is not enough 
to explain the current which carries each man away 
from his own. Why does the peasant desert for the 
inn the house that his father and grandfather found 
so comfortable ? It has remained the same. There 
is the same fire in the same chimney. Whence comes 
it that it lights only an incomplete circle, when in 
olden times young and old sat shoulder to shoulder? 
Something has changed in the minds of men. 
Yielding to dangerous impulses, they have broken 
with simplicity. The fathers have quitted their 
post of honor, the wives grow dull beside the soli- 
tary hearth, and the children quarrel while waiting 
their turn to go abroad, each after his own fancy. 

We must learn again to live the home life, to 
value our domestic traditions. A pious care has 
preserved certain monuments of the past. So an- 
tique dress, provincial dialects, old folk songs have 
found appreciative hands to gather them up before 
they should disappear from the earth. What a 
good deed, to guard these crumbs of a great past, 
these vestiges of the souls of our ancestors ! Let us 



THE LIFE OF THE HOME 137 

do the same for our family traditions, save and 
guard as much as possible of the patriarchal, what- 
ever its form. 

BUT not everyone has traditions to keep. 
All the more reason for redoubling the 
effort to constitute and foster a family 
life. And to do this there is need neither of num- 
bers nor a rich establishment. To create a home 
you must have the spirit of home. Just as the 
smallest village may have its history, its moral 
stamp, so the smallest home may have its soul. 
Oh ! the spirit of places, the atmosphere which sur- 
rounds us in human dwellings ! What a world of 
mystery ! Here, even on the threshold the cold 
begins to penetrate, you are ill at ease, something 
intangible repulses you. There, no sooner does the 
door shut you in than friendliness and good humor 
envelop you. It is said that walls have ears. They 
have also voices, a mute eloquence. Everything 
that a dwelling contains is bathed in an ether of 
personality. And I find proof of its quality even in 
the apartments of bachelors and solitary women. 
What an abyss between one room and another 
room I Here, all is dead, indifferent, common- 



138 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

place : the device of the owner is written all over 
it, even in his fashion of arranging his photographs 
and books : All is the same to me ! There, one 
breathes in animation, a contagious joy in life. 
The visitor hears repeated in countless fashions : 
"Whoever you are, guest of an hour, I wish you 
well, peace be with you ! " 

Words can do little justice to the subject of 
home, tell little about the effect of a favorite flowei 
in the window, or the charm of an old armchair 
where the grandfather used to sit, offering his wrin- 
kled hands to the kisses of chubby children. Poor 
moderns, always moving or remodeling ! We 
who from transforming our cities, our houses, our 
customs and creeds, have no longer where to lay 
our heads, let us not add to the pathos and empti- 
ness of our changeful existence by abandoning the 
life of the home. Let us light again the flame put 
out on our hearths, make sanctuaries for ourselves, 
warm nests where the children may grow into men, 
where love may find privacy, old age repose, prayer 
an altar, and the fatherland a cult ! 



XI 
SIMPLE BEAUTY 

SOMEONE may protest against the nature of 
the simple life in the name of esthetics, 
or oppose to ours the theory of the ser- 
vice of luxury — that providence of busi- 
ness, fostering mother of arts, and grace of civilized 
society. We shall try, briefly, to anticipate these 
objections. 

It will no doubt have been evident that the spirit 
which animates these pages is not utilitarian. It 
would be an error to suppose that the simplicity we 
seek has anything in common with that which 
misers impose upon themselves through cupidity, or 
narrow-minded people through false austerity. To 
the former the simple life is the one that costs 
least ; to the latter it is a flat and colorless exist- 
ence, whose merit lies in depriving one's self of 
everything bright, smiling, seductive. 

It displeases us not a whit that people of large 
means should put their fortune into circulation in- 
stead of hoarding it, so giving life to commerce and 

139 



140 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

the fine arts. That is using one's privileges to good 
advantage. What we would combat is foolish prod- 
igality, the selfish use of wealth, and above all the 
quest of the superfluous on the part of those who 
have the greatest need of taking thought for the 
necessary. The lavishness of a Maecenas could not 
have the same effect in a society as that of a com- 
mon spendthrift who astonishes his contemporaries 
by the magnificence of his life and the folly of his 
waste. In these two cases the same term means 
very different things — to scatter money broadcast 
does not say it all ; there are ways of doing it which 
ennoble men, and others which degrade them. 
Besides, to scatter money supposes that one is well 
provided with it. When the love of sumptuous liv- 
ing takes possession of those whose means are lim- 
ited, the matter becomes strangely altered. And a 
very striking characteristic of our time is the rage 
for scattering broadcast which the very people have 
who ought to husband their resources. Munificence 
is a benefit to society, that we grant willingly. Let 
us even allow that the prodigality of certain rich 
men is a safety-valve for the escape of the super- 
abundant : we shall not attempt to gainsay it. Our 
contention is that too many people meddle with the 



SIMPLE BEAUTY 141 

safety-valve when to practice economy is the part of 
both their interest and their duty : their extrava- 
gance is a private misfortune and a public danger. 

SO much for the utility of luxury. 
We now wish to explain ourselves upon the 
question of esthetics — oh ! very modestly, 
and without trespassing on the ground of the special- 
ists. Through a too common illusion, simplicity 
and beauty are considered as rivals. But simple is 
not synonymous with ugly, any more than sumptu- 
ous, stylish and costly are synonymous with beautiful. 
Our eyes are wounded by the crying spectacle of 
gaudy ornament, venal art and senseless and grace- 
less luxury. Wealth coupled with bad taste some- 
times makes us regret that so much money is in 
circulation to provoke the creation of such a prodi- 
gality of horrors. Our contemporary art suffers as 
much from the want of simplicity as does our liter- 
ature — too much in it that is irrelevant, over- 
wrought, falsely imagined. Rarely is it given us to 
contemplate in line, form, or color, that simplicity 
allied to perfection which commands the eyes as 
evidence does the mind. We need to be rebaptized 
in the ideal purity of immortal beauty which puts its 



142 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

seal on the masterpieces ; one shaft of its radiance 
is worth more than all our pompous exhibitions. 

YET what we now have most at heart is to 
speak of the ordinary esthetics of life, of 
the care one should bestow upon the adorn- 
ment of his dwelling and his person, giving to exist- 
ence that luster without which it lacks charm. For 
it is not a matter of indifference whether man pays 
attention to these superfluous necessities or whether 
he does not : it is by them that we know whether 
he puts soul into his work. Far from considering 
it as wasteful to give time and thought to the per- 
fecting, beautifying and poetizing of forms, I think 
we should spend as much as we can upon it. Na- 
ture gives us her example, and the man who should 
affect contempt for the ephemeral splendor of beauty 
with which we garnish our brief days, would lose 
sight of the intentions of Him who has put the 
same care and love into the painting of the lily of 
an hour and the eternal hills. 

But we must not fall into the gross error of con- 
founding true beauty with that which has only the 
name. The beauty and poetry of existence lie in 
the understanding we have of it. Our home, our 



SIMPLE BEAUTY 148 

table, our dress should be the interpreters of inten- 
tions. That these intentions be so expressed, it is 
first necessary to have them, and he who possesses 
them makes them evident through the simplest 
means. One need not be rich to give grace and 
charm to his habit and his habitation : it suffices to 
have good taste and good-will. We come here to 
a point very important to everybody, but perhaps of 
more interest to women than to men. 

Those who would have women conceal themselves 
in coarse garments of the shapeless uniformity of 
bags, violate nature in her very heart, and misun- 
derstand completely the spirit of things. If dress 
were only a precaution to shelter us from cold or 
rain, a piece of sacking or the skin of a beast would 
answer. But it is vastly more than this. Man puts 
himself entire into all that he does ; he transforms 
into types the things that serve him. The dress is 
not simply a covering, it is a symbol. I call to wit- 
ness the rich flowering of national and provincial 
costumes, and those worn by our early corporations 
A woman's toilette, too, has something to say to us. 
The more meaning there is in it, the greater its 
worth. To be truly beautiful, it must tell us of 
beautiful things, things personal and veritable. 



144 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

Spend all the money you possess upon it, if its form 
is determined by chance or custom, if it has no re- 
lation to her who wears it, it is only toggery, a 
domino. Ultra-fashionable dress, which completely 
masks feminine personality under designs of pure 
convention, despoils it of its principal attraction. 
From this abuse it comes about that many things 
which women admire do as much wrong to their 
beauty as to the purses of their husbands and 
fathers. What would you say of a young girl 
who expressed her thoughts in terms very choice, 
indeed, but taken word for word from a phrase-book ? 
What charm could you find in this borrowed lan- 
guage ? The effect of toilettes well-designed in 
themselves but seen again and again on all women 
indiscriminately, is precisely the same. 

I can not resist citing here a passage from Ca- 
mille Lemonnier, that harmonizes with my idea. 

" Nature has given to the fingers of woman a 
charming art, which she knows by instinct, and 
which is peculiarly her own — as silk to the worm, 
and lace-work to the swift and subtle spider. She 
is the poet, the interpreter of her own grace and in- 
genuousness, the spinner of the mystery in which 
her wish to please arrays itself. All the talent she 



SIMPLE BEAUTY 145 

expends in her effort to equal man in the other 
arts, is never worth the spirit and conception 
wrought out through a bit of stuff in her skillful 
hands. 

" Well, I wish that this art were more honored 
than it is. As education should consist in thinking 
with one's mind, feeling with one's heart, express- 
ing the little personalities of the inmost, invisible /, 
— which on the contrary are repressed, leveled 
down by conformity, — I would that the young girl 
in her novitiate of womanhood, the future mother, 
might early become the little exponent of this art 
of the toilet, her own dressmaker in short — she 
who one day shall make the dresses of her children. 
But with the taste and the gift to improvise, to 
express herself in that masterpiece of feminine per- 
sonality and skill — a gown, without which a woman 
is no more than a bundle of rags." 

The dress you have made for yourself is almost 
always the most becoming, and, however that may 
be, it is the one that pleases you most. Women of 
leisure too often forget this ; working women, also, 
in city and country alike. Since these last are cos- 
tumed by dressmakers and milliners, in very doubt- 
ful imitation of the modish world, grace has almost 



146 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

disappeared from their dress. And has anything 
more surely the gift to please than the fresh appari- 
tion of a young working girl or a daughter of the 
fields, wearing the costume of her country, and 
beautiful from her simplicity alone? 

These same reflections might be applied to the 
fashion of decorating and arranging our houses. If 
there are toilettes which reveal an entire concep- 
tion of life, hats that are poems, knots of ribbon 
that are veritable works of art, so there are interiors 
which after their manner speak to the mind. Why, 
under pretext of decorating our homes, do we de- 
stroy that personal character which always has such 
value ? Why have our sleeping-rooms conform to 
those of hotels, our reception-rooms to waiting- 
rooms, by making predominant a uniform type of 
official beauty ? 

W T hat a pity to go through the houses of a city, 
the cities of a country, the countries of a vast conti- 
nent, and encounter everywhere certain forms, iden- 
tical, inevitable, exasperating by their repetition ? 
How esthetics would gain by more simplicity i In- 
stead of this luxury in job lots, all these decorations, 
pretentious but vapid from iteration, we should have 
an infinite variety ; happy improvisations would 



SIMPLE BEAUTY 147 

strike our eyes, the unexpected in a thousand 
forms would rejoice our hearts, and we should re- 
discover the secret of impressing on a drapery or a 
piece of furniture that stamp of human personality 
which makes certain antiques priceless. 

Let us pass at last to things simpler still ; I mean 
the little details of housekeeping which many 
young people of our day find so unpoeticai. Then 
contempt for material things, for the humble cares a 
house demands, arises from a confusion very com- 
mon but none the less unfortunate, which comes 
from the belief that beauty and poetry are within 
some things, while others lack them ; that some 
occupations are distinguished and agreeable, such as 
cultivating letters, playing the harp ; and that 
others are menial and disagreeable, like blacking 
shoes, sweeping, and watching the pot boil. Child- 
ish error I Neither harp nor broom has anything to 
do with it ; all depends on the hand in which they 
rest and the spirit that moves it. Poetry is not in 
things, it is in us. It must be impressed on objects 
from without, as the sculptor impresses his dream on 
the marble. If our life and our occupations remain 
too often without charm, in spite of any outward 
distinction they may have, it is because we have 



148 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

not known how to put anything into them. The 
height of art is to make the inert live, and to tame 
the savage. I would have our young girls apply 
themselves to the development of the truly femi- 
nine art of giving a soul to things which have none. 
The triumph of woman's charm is in that work. 
Only a woman knows how to put into a home that 
indefinable something whose virtue has made the 
poet say, "The housetop rejoices and is glad." 
They say there are no such things as fairies, or that 
there are fairies no longer, but they know not what 
they say. The original of the fairies sung by poets 
was found, and is still, among those amiable mortals 
who knead bread with energy, mend rents with 
cheerfulness, nurse the sick with smiles, put witch- 
ery into a ribbon and genius into a stew. 

IT is indisputable that the culture of the fine 
arts has something refining about it, and that 
our thoughts and acts are in the end impreg- 
nated with that which strikes our eyes. But the 
exercise of the arts and the contemplation of their 
products is a restricted privilege. It is not given to 
everyone to possess, to comprehend or to create fine 
things. Yet there is a kind of ministering beauty 



SIMPLE BEAUTY 149 

which may make its way everywhere — the beauty 
which springs from the hands of our wives and 
daughters. Without it, what is the most richly 
decorated house ? A dead dwelling-place. With 
it the barest home has life and brightness. Among 
the forces capable of transforming the will and 
increasing happiness, there is perhaps none in more 
universal use than this beauty. It knows how to 
shape itself by means of the crudest tools, in the 
midst of the greatest difficulties. When the dwell- 
ing is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, 
a woman who has the gift, finds a way to make order, 
fitness and convenience reign in her house. She 
puts care and art into everything she undertakes. 
To do well what one has to do is not in her eyes 
the privilege of the rich, but the right of all. That 
is her aim, and she knows how to give her home 
a dignity and an attractiveness that the dwellings of 
princes, if everything is left to mercenaries, cannot 
possess. 

Thus understood, life quickly shows itself rich in 
hidden beauties, in attractions and satisfactions close 
at hand. To be one's self, to realize in one's 
uatural place the kind of beauty which is fitting 
there — this is the ideal. How the mission of 



150 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

woman broadens and deepens in significance when 
it is summed up in this : to put a soul into the in- 
animate, and to give to this gracious spirit of things 
those subtle and winsome outward manifestations 
to which the most brutish of human beings is sen- 
sible. Is not this better than to covet what one 
has not, and to give one's self up to longings for a 
poor imitation of others' finery ? 



XII 

PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE INTER- 
COURSE OF MEN 

' T would perhaps be difficult to find a more 
convincing example than pride to show that 
the obstacles to a better, stronger, serener 
life are rather in us than in circumstances. 
The diversity, and more than that, the contrasts in 
social conditions give rise inevitably to all sorts of 
conflicts. Yet in spite of this how greatly would 
social relations be simplified, if we put another spirit 
into mapping out our plan of outward necessities ! 
Be well persuaded that it is not primarily differ- 
ences of class and occupation, differences in the 
outward manifestations of their destinies, which 
embroil men. If such were the case, we should 
find an idyllic peace reigning among colleagues, 
and all those whose interests and lot are virtually 
equivalent. On the contrary, as everyone knows, 
the most violent shocks come when equal meets 

equal, and there is no war worse than civil war. 

151 



152 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

But that which above all things else hinders men 
from good understanding, is pride. It makes a man 
a hedgehog, wounding everyone he touches. Let 
us speak first of the pride of the great. 

What offends me in this rich man passing in his 
carriage, is not his equipage, his dress, or the num- 
ber and splendor of his retinue : it is his contempt. 
That he possesses a great fortune does not disturb 
me, unless I am badly disposed : but that he 
splashes me with mud, drives over my body, shows 
by his whole attitude that I count for nothing in 
his eyes because I am not rich like himself — this is 
what disturbs me, and righteously. He heaps suf- 
fering upon me needlessly. He humiliates and 
insults me gratuitously. It is not what is vulgar 
within me, but what is noblest that asserts itself in 
the face of this offensive pride. Do not accuse me 
of envy; I feel none; it is my manhood that is 
wounded. We need not search far to illustrate 
these ideas. Every man of any acquaintance with 
life has had numerous experiences which will justify 
our dictum in his eyes. In certain communities 
devoted to material interests, the pride of wealth 
dominates to such a degree that men are quoted 
like values in the stock market, The esteem in 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 153 

which a man is held is proportionate to the contents 
of his strong box. Here " Society " is made up of 
big fortunes, the middle class of medium fortunes. 
Then come people who have little, then those who 
have nothing. All intercourse is regulated by this 
principle. And the relatively rich man who has 
shown his disdain for those less opulent, is crushed 
in turn by the contempt of his superiors in fortune. 
So the madness of comparison rages from the sum- 
mit to the base. Such an atmosphere is ready to 
perfection for the nurture of the worst feeling ; 
yet it is not wealth, but the spirit of the wealthy 
that must be arraigned. 

Many rich men are free from this gross conception 
— especially is this true of those who from father 
to son are accustomed to ease — yet they sometimes 
forget that there is a certain delicacy in not making 
contrasts too marked. Suppose there is no wjrong 
in enjoying a large superfluity : is it indispensable 
to display it, to wound the eyes of those who lack 
necessities, to flaunt one's magnificence at the doors 
of poverty ? Good taste and a sort of modesty 
always hinder a well man from talking of his fine 
appetite, his sound sleep, his exuberance of spirits, 
in the presence of one dying of consumption. 



154 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

Many of the rich do not exercise this tact, and 
so are greatly wanting in pity and discretion. Are 
they not unreasonable to complain of envy, after 
having done everything to provoke it ? 

But the greatest lack is that want of discernment 
which leads men to ground their pride in their for- 
tune. To begin with, it is a childish confusion of 
thought to consider wealth as a personal quality ; it 
would be hard to find a more ingenuous fashion of 
deceiving one's self as to the relative value of the 
container and the thing contained. I have no wish 
to dwell on this question : it is too painful. And 
yet one cannot resist saying to those concerned : 
" Take care, do not confound what you possess with 
what you are. Go learn to know the under side of 
worldly splendor, that you may feel its moral misery 
and its puerility/ ' The traps pride sets for us are 
too ridiculous. We should distrust association with 
a thing that make us hateful to our neighbors and 
robs us of clearness of vision. 

He who yields to the pride of riches, forgets this 
other point, the most important of all — that posses- 
sion is a public trust. Without doubt, individual 
wealth is as legitimate as individual existence and 
liberty. These things are inseparable, and it is a 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 155 

dream pregnant with dangers that offers battle to 
such fundamentals of life. But the individual 
touches society at every point, and all he does 
should be done with the whole in view. Possession, 
then, is less a privilege of which to be proud than a 
charge whose gravity should be felt. As there is an 
apprenticeship, often very difficult to serve, for the 
exercise of every social office, so this profession we 
call wealth demands an apprenticeship. To know 
how to be rich is an art, and one of the least easy of 
arts to master. Most people, rich and poor alike, 
imagine that in opulence one has nothing to do but 
to take life easy. That is why so few men know how 
to be rich. In the hands of too many, wealth, ac- 
cording to the genial and redoubtable comparison of 
Luther, is like a harp in the hoofs of an ass. They 
have no idea of the manner of its use. 

So when we encounter a man at once rich and 
simple, that is to say, who considers his wealth as a 
means of fulfilling his mission in the world, we 
should offer him our homage, for he is surely mark- 
worthy. He has surmounted obstacles, borne trials, 
and triumphed in temptations both gross and subtle. 
He does not fail to discriminate between the con- 
tents of his pocketbook and the contents of his 



156 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

head or heart, and he does not estimate his fellow- 
men in figures. His exceptional position, instead 
of exalting him, makes him humble, for he is very 
sensible of how far he falls short of reaching the 
level of his duty. He has remained a man — that 
says it all. He is accessible, helpful, and far from 
making of his wealth a barrier to separate him from 
other men, he makes it a means for coming nearer 
and nearer to them. Although the profession of 
riches has been so dishonored by the selfish and the 
proud, such a man as this always makes his worth 
felt by everyone not devoid of a sense of justice. 
Each of us who comes in contact with him and sees 
him live, is forced to look within and ask himself 
the question, " What would become of me in such 
a situation ? Should I keep this modesty, this 
naturalness, this uprightness which uses its own as 
though it belonged to others ? " So long as there 
is a human society in the world, so long as there 
are bitterly conflicting interests, so long as envy 
and egoism exist on the earth, nothing will be 
worthier of honor than wealth permeated by the 
spirit of simplicity. And it will do more than make 
itself forgiven ; it will make itself beloved. 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 151 

MORE dangerous than pride inspired by 
wealth is that inspired by power, and 
I mean by the word every prerogative 
that one man has over another, be it unlimited or 
restricted. I see no means of preventing the exist- 
ence in the world of men of unequal authority. 
Every organism supposes a hierarchy of powers — 
we shall never escape from that law. But I fear 
that if the love of power is so widespread, the spirit 
of power is almost impossible to find. From wrong 
understanding and misuse of it, those who keep 
even a fraction of authority almost everywhere suc- 
ceed in compromising it. 

Power exercises a great influence over him who 
holds it. A head must be very well balanced not 
to be disturbed by it. The sort of dementia which 
took possession of the Roman emperors in the time 
of their world-wide rule, is a universal malady 
whose symptoms belong to all times. In every 
man there sleeps a tyrant, awaiting only a favorable 
occasion for waking. Now the tyrant is the worst 
enemy of authority, because he furnishes us its in- 
tolerable caricature, whence come a multitude of 
social complications, collisions and hatreds. Every 
man who says to those dependent on him : " Do 



158 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

this because it is my will and pleasure/' does ilL 
There is within each one of us something that in- 
vites us to resist personal power, and this some- 
thing is very respectable. For at bottom we are 
equal, and there is no one who has the right to ex- 
act obedience from me because he is he and I am 
I : if he does so, his command degrades me, and I 
have no right to suffer myself to be degraded. 

One must have lived in schools, in work-shops, in 
the army, in Government offices, he must have 
closely followed the relations between masters and 
servants, have observed a little everywhere where 
the supremacy of man exercises itself over man, to 
form any idea of the injury done by those who use 
power arrogantly. Of every free soul they make 
a slave soul, which is to say the soul of a rebel. 
And it appears that this result, with its social dis- 
aster, is most certain when he who commands is 
least removed from the station of him who obeys. 
The most implacable tyrant is the tyrant himself 
under authority. Foremen and overseers put more 
violence into their dealings than superintendents 
and employers. The corporal is generally harsher 
than the colonel. In certain families where madam 
has not much more education than her maid, the 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 159 

relations between theni are those of the convict and 
his warder. And woe everywhere to him who falls 
into the hands of a subaltern drunk with his author- 
ity ! 

We forget that the first duty of him who exer- 
cises power is humility. Haughtiness is not author- 
ity. It is not we who are the law ; the law is over 
our heads. We only interpret it, but to make it 
valid in the eyes of others, we must first be subject 
to it ourselves. To command and to obey in the 
society of men, are after all but two forms of the 
same virtue — voluntary servitude. If you are not 
obeyed, it is generally because you have not yourself 
obeyed first. 

The secret of moral ascendancy rests with those 
who rule with simplicity. They soften by the spirit 
the harshness of the fact. Their authority is not 
in shoulder-straps, titles or disciplinary measures. 
They make use of neither ferule nor threats, yet 
they achieve everything. Why ? Because we feel 
that they are themselves ready for everything. 
That which confers upon a man the right to de- 
mand of another the sacrifice of his time, his 
money, his passions, even his life, is not only that 
he is resolved upon all these sacrifices himself, but 



160 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

that he has made them in advance. In the com- 
mand of a man animated by this spirit of renuncia- 
tion, there is a mysterious force which communi- 
cates itself to him who is to obey, and helps him do 
his duty. 

In all the provinces of human activity there are 
chiefs who inspire, strengthen, magnetize their sol- 
diers : under their direction the troops do prodigies. 
With them one feels himself capable of any effort, 
ready to go through fire, as the saying has it ; and 
if he goes, it is with enthusiasm. 

BUT the pride of the exalted is not the only 
pride ; there is also the pride of the hum- 
ble — this arrogance of underlings, fit 
pendant to that of the great. The root of these 
two prides is the same. It is not alone that lofty 
and imperious being, the man who says, " I am the 
law," that provokes insurrection by his very atti- 
tude ; it is also that pig-headed subaltern who will 
not admit that there is anything beyond his knowl- 
edge. 

There are really many people who find all superi- 
ority irritating. For them, every piece of advice is 
an offense, every criticism an imposition, every 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 16i 

order an outrage on their liberty. They would not 
know how to submit to rule. To respect anything 
or anybody would seem to them a mental aberra- 
tion. They say to people after their fashion : 
" Beyond us there is nothing." 

To the family of the proud belong also those diffi- 
cult and supersensitive people who in humble life 
find that their superiors never do them fitting 
honor, whom the best and most kindly do not suc- 
ceed in satisfying, and w T ho go about their duties 
with the air of a martyr. At bottom these dis- 
affected minds have too much misplaced self-respect. 
They do not know 7 how to fill their place simply, 
but complicate their life and that of others by 
unreasonable demands and morbid suspicions. 

When one takes the trouble to study men at 
short range, he is surprised to find that pride has so 
many lurking-places among those who are by com- 
mon consent called the humble. So powerful is 
this vice, that it arrives at forming round those who 
live in the most modest circumstances a wall which 
isolates them from their neighbors. There they are, 
intrenched, barricaded with their ambitions and 
their contempts, as inaccessible as the powerful of 
earth behind their aristocratic prejudices. Obscure 



162 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

or illustrious, pride wraps itself in its dark royalty of 
enmity to the human race. It is the same in 
misery and in high places — solitary and impotent, 
on guard against everybody, embroiling everything. 
And the last word about it is always this : If 
there is so much hostility and hatred between differ- 
ent classes of men, it is due less to exterior condi- 
tions than to an interior fatality. Conflicting inter- 
ests and differences of situation dig ditches between 
us, it is true, but pride transforms the ditches into 
gulfs, and in reality it is pride alone which cries 
from brink to brink : " There is nothing in common 
between you and us." 

E have not finished with pride, but it is 
impossible to picture it under all its 
forms. I feel most resentful against it 
when it meddles with knowledge and appropriates 
that. We owe our knowledge to our fellows, as 
we do our riches and power. It is a social force 
which ought to be of service to everybody, and it 
can only be so when those who know remain sym- 
pathetically near to those who know not. When 
knowledge is turned into a tool for ambition, it 
destroys itself. 




PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 163 

And what shall we say of the pride of good men ? 
for it exists, and makes even virtue hateful. The 
just who repent them of the evil others do, remain 
in brotherhood and social rectitude. But the just 
who despise others for their faults and misdeeds, 
cut themselves off from humanity, and their good- 
ness, descended to the rank of an ornament for 
their vanity, becomes like those riches which kind- 
ness does not inform, like authority untempered by 
the spirit of obedience. Like proud wealth and 
arrogant power, supercilious virtue also is detestable. 
It fosters in man traits and an attitude provocative 
of I know not what. The sight of it repels instead 
of attracting, and those whom it deigns to dis- 
tinguish with its benefits feel as though they had 
been slapped in the face. 

To resume and conclude, it is an error to think 
that our advantages, whatever they are, should be 
put to the service of our vanity. Each of them 
constitutes for him who enjoys it an obligation and 
not a reason for vainglory. Material wealth, power, 
knowledge, gifts of the heart and mind, become so 
much cause for discord when they serve to nourish 
pride. They remain beneficent only so long as they 
are the source of modesty in those who possess them. 



164 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

Let us be humble if we have great possessions, 
for that proves that we are great debtors : all that a 
man has he owes to someone, and are we sure of 
being able to pay our debts ? 

Let us be humble if we sit in high places and 
hold the fate of others in our hands ; for no clear- 
sighted man can fail to be sensible of unfitness for 
so grave a role. 

Let us be humble if we have much knowledge, 
for it only serves to better show the vastness of the 
unknown, and to compare the little we have dis- 
covered for ourselves with the amplitude of that 
which we owe to the pains of others. 

And, above all, let us be humble if we are virtuous, 
since no one should be more sensible of his defects 
than he whose conscience is illumined, and since he 
more than anyone else should feel the need of char- 
ity toward evil-doers, even of suffering in their stead. 

« A ND what about the necessary distinctions 
l % in life?" someone may ask. "As a 
^- -^ result of your simplifications, are you not 
going to destroy that sense of the difference be- 
tween men which must be maintained if society 
exists at all ? " 



PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY 165 

I have no mind to suppress distinctions and differ- 
ences. But I think that what distinguishes a man 
is not found in his social rank, his occupation, his 
dress or his fortune, but solely in himself. More 
than any other our own age has pricked the vain 
bubble of purely outward greatness. To be some- 
body at present, it does not suffice to wear the man- 
tle of an emperor or a royal crown : what honor is 
there in wielding power through gold lace, a coat of 
arms or a ribbon? Not that visible signs are to be 
despised ; they have their meaning and use, but on 
condition that they cover something and not a 
vacuum. The moment they cease to stand for real- 
ities, they become useless and dangerous. The only 
true distinction is superior worth. If you would 
have social rank duly respected, you must begin by 
being worthy of the rank that is your own ; otherwise 
you help to bring it into hatred and contempt. It 
is unhappily too true that respect is diminishing 
among us, and it certainly is not from a lack of lines 
drawn round those who wish to be respected. The 
root of the evil is in the mistaken idea that high 
station exempts him who holds it from observing 
the common obligations of life. As we rise, we be- 
lieve that we free ourselves from the law, forgetting 



166 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

that the spirit of obedience and humility should 
grow with our possessions and power. So it comes 
about that those who demand the most homage 
make the least effort to merit the homage they de- 
mand. This is why respect is diminishing. 

The sole distinction necessary is the wish to be 
come better. The man who strives to be better 
becomes more humble, more approachable, more 
friendly even with those who owe him allegiance. 
But as he gains by being better known, he loses 
nothing in distinction, and he reaps the more respect 
in that he has sown the less pride. 



XIII 
THE EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 

THE simple life being above all else the 
product of a direction of mind, it is 
natural that education should have 
much to do with it. 
In general but two methods of rearing children 
are practiced : the first is to bring them up foi 
ourselves ; the second, to bring them up for them- 
selves. 

In the first case the child is looked upon as a 
complement of the parents : he is part of their 
property, occupies a place among their possessions. 
Sometimes this place is the highest, especially 
when the parents value the life of the affections. 
Again, where material interests rule, the child holds 
second, third, or even the last place. In any case 
he is a nobody. Wnile he is young, he gravitates 
round his parents, not only by obedience, which is 
right, but by the subordination of all his originality, 

all his being. As he grows older, this subordination 

167 



168 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

becomes a veritable confiscation, extending to his 
ideas, his feelings, everything. His minority be- 
comes perpetual. Instead of slowly evolving into 
independence, the man advances into slavery. He 
is what he is permitted to be, what his father's busi- 
ness, religious beliefs, political opinions or esthetic 
tastes require him to be. He will think, speak, 
act, and marry according to the understanding and 
limits of the paternal absolutism. This family tyr- 
anny may be exercised by people with no strength 
of character. It is only necessary for them to be 
convinced that good order requires the child to be 
the property of the parents. In default of mental 
force, they possess themselves of him by other 
means — by sighs, supplications, or base seduc- 
tions. If they cannot fetter him, they snare his 
feet in traps. But that he should live in them, 
through them, for them, is the only thing admis- 
sible. 

Education of this sort is not the practice of fam- 
ilies only, but also of great social organizations 
whose chief educational function consists in putting 
a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit 
him, in the most iron-bound fashion, into existing 
forms. It is the attenuation, pulverization and as- 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 169 

similation of the individual in a social body, be it 
theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and 
routinary. Looked at from without, a like system 
seems the ideal of simplicity in education. Its 
processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and if a 
man were not somebody, if he were only a sample 
of the race, this would be the perfect education. 
As all wild beasts, all fish and insects of the same 
genus and species have the same markings, so we 
should all be identical, having the same tastes, the 
same language, the same beliefs, the same tenden- 
cies. But man is not simply a specimen of the 
race, and for that reason this sort of education is far 
from being simple in its results. Men so vary from 
one another, that numberless methods have to be 
invented to repress, stupefy, and extinguish individ- 
ual thought. And one never arrives at it then but 
in part, a fact which is continually deranging every- 
thing. At each moment, by some fissure, some in- 
terior force of initiative is making a violent way to 
the light, producing explosions, upheavals, all sorts 
of grave disorders. And where there are no out- 
ward manifestations, the evil lies dormant ; beneath 
apparent order are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made 
by an abnormal existence, apathy, death. 



170 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

The system is evil which produces such fruit, and 
however simple it may appear, in reality it brings 
forth all possible complications. 



F 9 ^HE other system is the extreme opposite, 
that of bringing up children for themselves. 
-*- The roles are reversed : the parents are 
there for the child. No sooner is he born than he 
becomes the center. White-headed grandfather and 
stalwart father bow before these curls. His lisping 
is their law. A sign from him suffices. If he cries 
in the night, no fatigue is of account, the whole 
household must be roused. The new-comer is not 
long in discovering his omnipotence, and before he 
can walk he is drunken with it. As he grows older 
all this deepens and broadens. Parents, grandpar- 
ents, servants, teachers, everybody is at his com- 
mand. He accepts the homage and even the im- 
molation of his neighbor : he treats like a rebellious 
subject anyone who does not step out of his path. 
There is only himself. He is the unique, the per- 
fect, the infallible. Too late it is perceived that all 
this has been evolving a master ; and what a master ! 
forgetful of sacrifices, without respect, even pity. 
He no longer has any regard for those to whom he 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 171 

owes even-thing, and he goes through life without 
law or check. 

This education, too, has its social counterpart. It 
flourishes wherever the past does not count, where 
history begins with the living, where there is no 
tradition, no discipline, no reverence ; where those 
who know the least make the most noise ; where 
those who stand for public order are alarmed by 
every chance comer whose power lies in his making 
a great outcry and respecting nothing. It insures 
the reign of transitory passion, the triumph of the 
inferior will. I compare these two educations — one, 
the exaltation of the environment, the other of the 
individual ; one the absolutism of tradition, the other 
the tyranny of the new — and I find them equallv 
baneful. But the most disastrous of all is the 
combination of the two, which produces human be- 
ings half-automatons, half-despots, forever vacillat- 
ing between the spirit of a sheep and the spirit of 
revolt or domination. 

Children should be educated neither for them- 
selves nor for their parents : for man is no more 
designed to be a personage than a specimen. They 
should be educated for life. The aim of their edu- 
cation is to aid them to become active members of 



172 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

humanity, brotherly forces, free servants of the civil 
organization. To follow a method of education in- 
spired by any other principle, is to complicate life, 
deform it, sow the seeds of all disorders. 

When we would sum up in a phrase the destiny 
of the child, the word future springs to our lips. 
The child is the future. This word says all — the 
sufferings of the past, the stress of to-day, hope. 
But when the education of the child begins, he is 
incapable of estimating the reach of this word; for 
he is held by impressions of the present. Who 
then shall give him' the first enlightenment and 
put him in the way he should go ? The parents, 
the teachers. And with very little reflection they 
perceive that their work does not interest simply 
themselves and the child, but that they represent 
and administer impersonal powers and interests. 
The child should continually appear to them as a 
future citizen. With this ruling idea, they will 
take thought for two things that complement 
each other — for the initial and personal force 
which is germinating in the child, and for the social 
destination of this force. At no moment of their 
direction over him can they forget that this little 
being confided to their care must become himself 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 173 

and a brother. These two conditions, far from ex- 
cluding each other, never exist apart. It is impos- 
sible to be brotherly, to love, to give one's self, un- 
less one is master of himself ; and reciprocally, none 
can possess himself, comprehend his own individual 
being, until he has first made his way through the 
outward accidents of his existence, down to the pro- 
found springs of life where man feels himself one 
with other men in all that is most intimately his own. 
To aid a child to become himself and a brother it 
is necessary to protect him against the violent and 
destructive action of the forces of disorder. These 
forces are exterior and interior. Every child is 
menaced from without not only by material dangers 
but by the meddlesomeness of alien wills ; and from 
within, by an exaggerated idea of his own personal- 
ity and all the fancies it breeds. There is a great 
outward danger which may come from the abuse of 
power in educators. The right of might finds itself 
a place in education with extreme facility. To 
educate another, one must have renounced this 
right, that is to say, made abnegation of the inferior 
sentiment of personal importance, which transforms 
us into the enemies of others, even of our own chil- 
dren. Our authority is beneficent only when it is 



174 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

inspired by one higher than our own. In this 
case it is not only salutary, but also indispensa- 
ble, and becomes in its turn the best guarantee 
against the greater peril which threatens the child 
from within — that of exaggerating his own import- 
ance. At the beginning of life the vividness of 
personal impressions is so great, that to establish an 
equilibrium, they must be submitted to the gentle 
influence of a calm and superior will. The true 
quality of the office of educator is to represent this 
will to the child, in a manner as continuous and as 
disinterested as possible. Educators, then, stand 
for all that is to be respected in the world. They 
give to the child impressions of that which pre- 
cedes it, outruns it, envelops it: but they do not 
crush it ; on the contrary, their will and all the 
influence they transmit, become elements nutritive 
of its native energy. Such use of authority as this, 
cultivates that fruitful obedience out of which free 
souls are born. The purely personal authority of 
parents, masters and institutions is to the child 
like the brushwood beneath which the young plant 
withers and dies. Impersonal authority, the author- 
ity of a man who has first submitted himself to the 
time-honored realities before which he wishes the 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 175 

individual fancy of the child to bend, resembles 
pure and luminous air. True it has an activity, and 
influences us in its manner, but it nourishes our 
individuality and gives it firmness and stability. 
Without this authority there is no education. To 
watch, to guide, to keep a firm hand — such is the 
function of the educator. He should appear to the 
child not like a barrier of whims, which, if need be, 
one may clear, provided the leap be proportioned to 
the height of the obstacle ; but like a transparent 
wall through which may be seen unchanging reali- 
ties, laws, limits, and truths against which no action 
is possible. Thus arises respect, which is the 
faculty of conceiving something greater than our- 
selves — respect, which broadens us and frees us by 
making us more modest. This is the law of educa- 
tion for simplicity. It may be summed up in these 
words : to make free and reverential men, who shall 
be individual and fraternal. 

LET us draw from this principle some practi- 
cal applications. 
From the very fact that the child is the 
future, he must be linked to the past by piety. 
We owe it to him to clothe tradition in the forms 



176 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

most practical and most fit to create a deep impres- 
sion : whence the exceptional place that should 
be given in education to the ancients, to the cult 
of remembrance of the past, and by extension, to 
the history of the domestic rooftree. Above all do 
we fulfil a duty toward our children when we give 
the place of honor to the grandparents. Nothing 
speaks to a child with so much force, or so well de- 
velops his modesty, as to see his father and mother, 
on all occasions, preserve toward an old grandfather, 
often infirm, an attitude of respect. It is a perpet- 
ual object lesson that is irresistible. That it may 
have its full force, it is necessary for a tacit under- 
standing to obtain among all the grown-up members 
of the family. To the child's eyes they must all be 
in league, held to mutual respect and understand- 
ing, under penalty of compromising their educa- 
tional authority. And in their number must be 
counted the servants. Servants are big people, and 
the same sentiment of respect is injured in the 
child's disregard of them as in his disregard of his 
father or grandfather. The moment he addresses 
an impolite or arrogant word to a person older than 
himself, he strays from the path that a child ought 
never to quit ; and if only occasionally the parents 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 177 

neglect to point this out, they will soon perceive by 
his conduct toward themselves, that the enemy has 
found entrance to his heart. 

We mistake if we think that a child is naturally 
alien to respect, basing this opinion on the very 
numerous examples of irreverence which he offers 
us. Respect is for the child a fundamental need. 
His moral being feeds on it. The child aspires 
confusedly to revere and admire something. But 
when advantage is not taken of this aspiration, it 
gets corrupted or lost. By our lack of cohesion 
and mutual deference, we, the grown-ups, dis- 
credit daily in the child's eyes our own cause and 
that of everything worthy of respect. We in- 
oculate in him a bad spirit whose effects then turn 
against us. 

This pitiful truth nowhere appears with more 
force than in the relations between masters and ser- 
vants, as we have made them. Our social errors, 
our want of simplicity and kindness, all fall back 
unon the heads of our children. There are cer- 
tainly few people of the middle classes who under- 
stand that it is better to part with many thousands 
of dollars than to lead their children to lose respect 
for servants, who represent in our households the 



178 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

humble. Yet nothing is truer. Maintain as strict- 
ly as you will conventions and distances, — that de- 
markation of social frontiers which permits each one 
to remain in his place and to observe the law of dif- 
ferences. That is a good thing, I am persuaded, 
but on condition of never forgetting that those who 
serve us are men and women like ourselves. You 
require of your domestics certain formulas of speech 
and certain attitudes, outward evidence of the re- 
spect they owe you. Do you also teach your 
children and use yourselves manners toward your 
servants which show them that you respect their 
dignity as individuals, as you desire them to respect 
yours ? Here we have continually in our homes an 
excellent ground for experiment in the practice of 
that mutual respect which is one of the essential 
conditions of social sanity. I fear we profit by it 
too little. We do not fail to exact respect, but we 
fail to give it. So it is most frequently the case 
that we get only hypocrisy and this supplementary 
result, all unexpected, — the cultivation of pride in 
our children. These two factors combined heap up 
great difficulties for that future which we ought to 
be safeguarding. I am right then in saying that 
the day when by your own practices you have 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 179 

brought about the lessening of respect in your chil- 
dren, you have suffered a sensible loss. 

Why should I not say it ? It seems to me that 
the greater part of us labor for this loss. On all 
sides, in almost every social rank, I notice that a 
pretty bad spirit is fostered in children, a spirit of 
reciprocal contempt. Here, those who have cal- 
loused hands and working-clothes are disdained ; 
there, it is all who do not wear blue jeans. Chil- 
dren educated in this spirit make sad fellow-citi- 
zens. There is in all this the want of that sim- 
plicity which makes it possible for men of good 
intentions, of however diverse social standing, to col- 
laborate without any friction arising from the con- 
ventional distance that separates them. 

If the spirit of caste causes the loss of respect, par- 
tisanship, of whatever sort, is quite as productive of 
it. In certain quarters children are brought up in 
such fashion that they respect but one country — 
their own ; one system of government — that of 
their parents and masters ; one religion — that 
which they have been taught. Does anyone sup- 
pose that in this way men can be shaped who shall 
respect country, religion and law ? Is this a prop- 
er respect — this respect which does not extend 



180 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

beyond what touches and belongs to ourselves ? 
Strange blindness of cliques and coteries, which ar- 
rogate to themselves with so much ingenuous com- 
placence the title of schools of respect, and which, 
outside themselves, respect nothing. In reality they 
teach : " Country, religion, law — we are all these ! " 
Such teaching fosters fanaticism, and if fanaticism 
is not the sole anti-social ferment, it is surely one 
of the worst and most energetic 

IF simplicity of heart is an essential condition of 
respect, simplicity of life is its best school. 
Whatever be the state of your fortune, avoid 
everything which could make your children think 
themselves more or better than others. Though 
your wealth would permit you to dress them 
richly, remember the evil you might do in ex- 
citing their vanity. Preserve them from the evil 
of believing that to be elegantly dressed suffices 
for distinction, and above all do not carelessly in- 
crease by their clothes and their habits of life, the 
distance which already separates them from other 
children: dress them simply. And if> on the con- 
trary, it would be necessary for you to economize to 
give your children the pleasure of fine clothes, I 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 181 

would that I might dispose you to reserve your spirit 
of sacrifice for a better cause. You risk seeing it 
illy recompensed. You dissipate your money when 
it would much better avail to save it for serious 
needs, and you prepare for yourself, later on, a har- 
vest of ingratitude. How dangerous it is to ac- 
custom your sons and daughters to a style of living 
beyond your means and theirs ! In the first place, it 
is very bad for your purse ; in the second place it 
develops a contemptuous spirit in the very bosom of 
the family. If you dress your children like little lords, 
and give them to understand that they are superior 
to you, is it astonishing if they end by disdaining you ? 
You will have nourished at your table the declassed 
— a product which costs dear and is worthless. 

Any fashion of instructing children whose most 
evident result is to lead them to despise their par- 
ents and the customs and activities among which 
they have grown up, is a calamity. It is effective 
for nothing but to produce a legion of malcontents, 
with hearts totally estranged from their origin, their 
race, their natural interests — everything, in short, 
that makes the fundamental fabric of a man. 
Once detached from the vigorous stock which pro- 
duced them, the wind of their restless ambition drives 



182 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

them over the earth, like dead leaves that will in 
the end be heaped up to ferment and rot together. 
Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds, but 
by an evolution slow and certain. In preparing a 
career for our children, let us imitate her. Let us 
not confound progress and advancement with those 
violent exercises called somersaults. Let us not so 
bring up our children that they will come to despise 
work and the aspirations and simple spirit of their 
fathers : let us not expose them to the temptation 
of being ashamed of our poverty if they themselves 
come to fortune. A society is indeed diseased when 
the sons of peasants begin to feel disgust for the 
fields, when the sons of sailors desert the sea, when 
the daughters of workingmen, in the hope of being 
taken for heiresses, prefer to walk the streets alone 
rather than beside their honest parents. A society 
is healthy, on the contrary, when each of its mem- 
bers applies himself to doing very nearly what his 
parents have done before him, but doing it better, 
and, looking to future elevation, is content first to 
fulfill conscientiously more modest duties.* 

* This would be the place to speak of work in general, and 
of its tonic effect upon education. But I have discussed the 
subject in my books Justice, Jeunesse, and V alliance. I 
must limit myself to referring the reader to them. 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 183 

EDUCATION should make independent men. 
If you wish to train your children for liberty, 
bring them up simply, and do not for a mo- 
ment fear that in so doing you are putting obstacles 
in the way of their happiness. It will be quite the 
contrary. The more costly toys a child has, the 
more feasts and curious entertainments, the less is 
he amused. 

In this there is a sure sign. Let us be temperate 
in our methods of entertaining youth, and especially 
let us not thoughtlessly create for them artificial 
needs. Food, dress, nursery, amusements — let all 
these be as natural and simple as possible. With 
the idea of making life pleasant for their children, 
some parents bring them up in habits of gormandiz- 
ing and idleness, accustom them to sensations not 
meant for their age, multiply their parties and 
entertainments. Sorry gifts these ! In place of a 
free man, you are making a slave. Gorged with 
luxury, he tires of it in time; and yet when for one 
reason or another his pleasures fail him, he will be 
miserable, and you with him : and what is worse, 
perhaps in some capital encounter of life, you will 
be ready — you and he together — to sacrifice manly 
dignity, truth, and duty, from sheer sloth. 



184 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

Let us bring up our children simply, I had almost 
said rudely. Let us entice them to exercise that 
gives them endurance — even to privations. Let 
them belong to those who are better trained to 
fatigue and the earth for a bed than to the comforts 
of the table and couches of luxury. So we shall 
make men of them, independent and staunch, who 
may be counted on, who will not sell themselves fol 
pottage, and who will have withal the faculty of 
being happy. 

A too easy life brings with it a sort of lassitude in 
vital energy. One becomes blase, disillusioned, an 
old young man, past being diverted. How many 
young people are in this state ! Upon them have 
been deposited, like a sort of mold, the traces of 
our decrepitude, our skepticism, our vices, and the 
bad habits they have contracted in our company. 
What reflections upon ourselves these youths weary 
of life force us to make ! What announcements are 
graven on their brows ! 

These shadows say to us by contrast that happi- 
ness lies in a life true, active, spontaneous, ungalled 
by the yoke of the passions, of unnatural needs, of 
unhealthy stimulus ; keeping intact the physical 
faculty of enjoying the light of day and the air we 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 185 

breathe, and in the heart, the capacity to thrill with 
the love of all that is generous, simple and fine. 

THE artificial life engenders artificial 
thought, and a speech little sure of 
itself. Normal habits, deep impressions, 
the ordinary contact with reality, bring frankness 
with them. Falsehood is the vice of a slave, the 
refuge of the cowardly and weak. He who is free 
and strong is unflinching in speech. We should 
encourage in our children the hardihood to speak 
frankly. What do we ordinarily do ? We trample 
on natural disposition, level it down to the unifor- 
mity which for the crowd is synonymous with good 
form. To think with one's own mind, feel with 
one's own heart, express one's own personality — 
how unconventional, how rustic ! — Oh ! the atrocity 
of an education which consists in the perpetual muz- 
zling of the only thing that gives any of us his 
reason for being .' Of how many soul-murders do 
we become guilty ! Some are struck down with 
bludgeons, others gently smothered with pillows ! 
Everything conspires against independence of char- 
acter. Wlien we are little, people wish us to be dolls 
or graven images ; when we grow up, they approve of us 



186 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

on condition that we are like all the rest of the 
world — automatons : when you have seen one of 
them you've seen them all. So the lack of origi- 
nality and initiative is upon us, and platitude and 
monotony are the distinctions of to-day. Truth 
can free us from this bondage : let our children be 
taught to be themselves, to ring clear, without crack 
or muffle. Make loyalty a need to them, and in 
their gravest failures, if only they acknowledge 
them, account it for merit that they have not cov- 
ered their sin. 

To frankness let us add ingenuousness, in our 
solicitude as educators. Let us have for this com- 
rade of childhood — a trifle uncivilized, it is true, 
but so gracious and friendly ! — all possible regard. 
We must not frighten it away : when it has once 
fled, it so rarely comes back ! Ingenuousness is not 
simply the sister of truth, the guardian of the indi- 
vidual qualities of each of us ; it is besides a great 
mforming and educating force. I see among us too 
many practical people, so called, who go about 
armed with terrifying spectacles and huge shears to 
ferret out naive things and clip their wings. They 
uproot ingenuousness from life, from thought, from 
education, and pursue it even to the region of 



EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY 187 

dreams. Under pretext of making men of their 
children, they prevent their being children at all ; 
— as if before the ripe fruit of autumn, flowers did 
not have to be, and perfumes, and songs of birds, 
and all the fairy springtime. 

I ask indulgence for everything naive and simple, 
not alone for the innocent conceits that flutter round 
the curly heads of children, but also for the legend, 
the folk song, the tales of the world of marvel and 
mystery. The sense of the marvellous is in the 
child the first form of that sense of the infinite with- 
out which a man is like a bird deprived of wings. 
Let us not wean the child from it, but let us guard 
in him the faculty of rising above what is earthy, 
so that he may appreciate later on those pure and 
moving symbols of vanished ages wherein human 
truth has found forms of expression that our arid 
logic will never replace. 



XIV 
CONCLUSION 

I THINK I have said enough of the spirit and 
manifestations of the simple life, to make it 
evident that there is here a whole forgotten 
world of strength and beauty. He can make 
conquest of it who has sufficient energy to detach 
himself from the fatal rubbish that trammels our 
days. It will not take him long to perceive that in 
renouncing some surface satisfactions and childish 
ambitions, he increases his faculty of happiness and 
his possibilities of right judgment. 

These results concern as much the private as the 
public life. It is incontestable that in striving 
against the feverish will to shine, in ceasing to make 
the satisfaction of our desires the end of our activity, 
in returning to modest tastes, to the true life, we 
shall labor for the unity of the family. Another 
spirit will breath in our homes, creating new cus- 
toms and an atmosphere more favorable to the edu- 
cation of children. Little by little our boys and 

188 



CONCLUSION 189 

girls will feel the enticement of ideals at once higher 
and more realizable. And transformation of the 
home will in time exercise its influence on public 
spirit. As the solidity of a wall depends upon the 
^rain of the stones and the consistence of the ce- 
ment which binds them together, so also the energy 
of public life depends upon the individual value of 
men and their power of cohesion. The great desid- 
eratum of our time is the culture of the component 
parts of society, of the individual man. Everything 
in the present social organism leads us back to this 
element. In neglecting it we expose ourselves to 
the loss of the benefits of progress, even to making 
our most persistent efforts turn to our own hurt. If 
in the midst of means continually more and more 
perfected, the workman diminishes in value, of 
what use are these fine tools at his disposal ? By 
their very excellence to make more evident the 
faults of him who uses them without discernment or 
without conscience. The wheelwork of the great 
modern machine is infinitely delicate. Carelessness, 
incompetence or corruption may produce here dis- 
turbances ot far greater gravity than would have 
threatened the more or less rudimentary organism of 
the society of the past. There is need then of look- 



190 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

ing to the quality of the individual called upon to 
contribute in any measure to the workings of this 
mechanism. This individual should be at once solid 
and pliable, inspired with the central law of life — 
to be one's self and fraternal. Everything within 
us and without us becomes simplified and unified 
under the influence of this law, which is the same 
for everybody and by which each one should guide 
his actions ; for our essential interests are not op- 
posing, they are identical. In cultivating the spirit 
of simplicity, we should arrive, then, at giving to 
public life a stronger cohesion. 

The phenomena of decomposition and destruction 
that we see there may all be attributed to the same 
cause, — lack of solidity and cohesion. It will 
never be possible to say how contrary to social good 
are the trifling interests of caste, of coterie, of 
church, the bitter strife for personal welfare, and, by 
a fatal consequence, how destructive these things 
are of individual happiness. A society in which 
each member is preoccupied with his own well-be- 
ing, is organized disorder. This is all that we learn 
from the irreconcilable conflicts of our uncompromis- 
ing egoism. 

We too much resemble those people who claim 



CONCLUSION 191 

the rights of family only to gain advantage from 
them, not to do honor to the connection. On all 
rounds of the social ladder we are forever putting 
forth claims. We all take the ground that we are 
creditors : no one recognizes the fact that he is a 
debtor, and our dealings with our fellows consist in 
inviting them, in tones sometimes amiable, some- 
times arrogant, to discharge their indebtedness to 
us. No good thing is attained in this spirit. For 
in fact it is the spirit of privilege, that eternal ene- 
my of universal law, that obstacle to brotherly un- 
derstanding which is ever presenting itself anew, 

IN a lecture delivered in 1882, M. Renan said 
that a nation is "a spiritual family/' and he 
added : " The essential of a nation is that all 
the individuals should have many things in com- 
mon, and also that all should have forgotten much/ 5 
It is important to know what to forget and what to 
remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily 
life. Our memories are lumbered with the things 
that divide us ; the things which unite us slip away. 
Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his 
souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his 
part of agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, 



192 THE SIMPLE LIFE 

public officer, proletary, bourgeois, or political or 
religious sectarian ; but his essential quality, which 
is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated 
to the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theo- 
retic notion of it. So that what occupies us and 
determines our actions, is precisely the thing that 
separates us from others, and there is hardly place 
for that spirit of unity which is as the soul of a 
people. 

So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. 
Men animated by a spirit of particularism, exclusive- 
ness, and pride, are continually clashing. They 
cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment 
of division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps 
up in their remembrance a stock of reciprocal ill- 
will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad feeling 
with its consequences. 

It must be rooted out of our midst. Remember, 
forget ! This we should say to ourselves every 
morning, in all our relations and affairs. Remember 
the essential, forget the accessory ! How much 
better should we discharge our duties as citizens, 
if high and low were nourished from this spirit ! 
How easy to cultivate pleasant remembrances in the 
mind of one's neighbor, by sowing it with kind 



CONCLUSION 193 

deeds and refraining from procedures of which in 
spite of himself he is forced to say, with hatred in 
his heart : " Never in the world will I forget ! " 

The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It 
softens asperities, bridges chasms, draws together 
hands and hearts. The forms which it takes in the 
world are infinite in number ; but never does it 
seem to us more admirable than when it shows it- 
self across the fatal barriers of position, interest, or 
prejudice, overcoming the greatest obstacles, per- 
mitting those whom everything seems to separate to 
understand one another, esteem one another, love 
one another. This is the true social cement, that 
goes into the building of a people. 



THE END* 



■ ' ... -' . ■ : 



